Senior Software Engineer – Ledger

Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure, covering stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income and 24/5 trading.

Among its subsidiaries Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs. Customers include broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

The company is backed by 400 million dollars in funding from Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund and Y Combinator.

THE TEAM

400+ globally distributed members working from their favourite places around the world, with teammates across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK and beyond. Alpaca is deeply committed to open source contributions.

Their core values are Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable.

THE ROLE

The Ledger Team builds a modern ledger system whose purpose is to maintain a complete and correct view of everything that has ever happened in every account.

From a business perspective that means a structured system for recording and aggregating transactional data, supporting financial reporting, decision-making and compliance. From an engineering perspective, the ledger is the source of truth for many services across the Alpaca ecosystem.

Alpaca are looking for an engineer obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, with proven experience architecting and building at scale, who is not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing opinions. You would have autonomy to design and implement solutions, while helping define the goals themselves alongside a cross-functional team.

THINGS YOU GET TO DO

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders across finance, operations and product to deliver high-impact projects
• Build backend systems and components with integrity, maintainability, scalability and stability in mind
• Own delivery of high-visibility features from design through deployment
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve the health of Alpaca's systems

MUST-HAVES

• A seasoned engineer with 5+ years working on systems at scale
• Obsessed with performant, defect-free, maintainable code
• A strong problem solver with a proactive mindset
• Able to create alignment with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike
• Comfortable working heads-down or tag-teaming problems
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Able to debug issues, or better still foresee and avoid them
• Experience with IDLs such as protobuf, RPC frameworks such as gRPC, cloud platforms such as GCP, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL

NICE TO HAVE

Financial services or accounting industry experience, distributed systems and databases, event-driven systems and messaging brokers such as Redpanda, remote working experience, and startup experience.

HOW THEY TAKE CARE OF YOU

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Health benefits
• New hire home-office setup, one-time USD 500
• Monthly stipend of USD 150 via a Brex card

LOCATION

The listing states Global Anywhere. Alpaca is genuinely globally distributed rather than remote-within-one-region, and the application asks which location and timezone you will be working from rather than restricting you to a country list.

No salary range is published.

BEFORE YOU APPLY

A GitHub or GitLab profile URL is a required field on the application, so have that ready.

Alpaca uses Greenhouse's AI-powered Talent Matching tool to compare applications against job requirements, with an opt-out link provided on the listing.