Staff Software Engineer - Margin & Risk
Alpaca is a brokerage infrastructure company providing developer APIs for stocks, options, fixed income, and crypto trading, plus tokenization infrastructure for TradFi–DeFi markets.
Maintainer signals as of 9/2/2026
Funding history
Investors
About Alpaca
Alpaca provides API-first brokerage infrastructure for fintechs, institutions, algorithmic traders, and developers. Its offerings include Broker API, Trading API, market data, self-clearing brokerage services, crypto services, and the Instant Tokenization Network for in-kind minting and redemption of tokenized assets.
Skills
About the Role
You will own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk systems across asset classes. You will build correct, observable services that implement margin methodologies and regulatory rules, enforce real-time risk controls, and automate margin-call workflows. You will improve reliability, performance, recovery, and failure isolation. You will lead design reviews, mentor engineers, collaborate on integration boundaries, and resolve production issues with durable preventative improvements.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of backend or distributed-systems experience
- Ownership of a high-volume consequential production system
- Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems
- Strong Go expertise or deep Java, C++, or Rust experience with willingness to work primarily in Go
- Deep knowledge of relational databases, transactions, consistency, and concurrency
- Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems, RPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar technologies
- Experience with Kubernetes
- Testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout experience
- Technical leadership and mentorship experience
- Clear communication with engineering, operations, and compliance stakeholders
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and technical roadmap for cross-asset margin and risk systems
- Design and build correct, testable, and observable services for margin methodologies and regulatory rules
- Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path
- Drive service reliability and performance, including throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation
- Define behavior and integration boundaries with product, operations, compliance, and engineering partners
- Set standards for transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts
- Lead design reviews and mentor engineers
- Act as a technical escalation point for production margin and risk issues
- Drive durable prevention after incidents
Benefits
- Stock options
- Health benefits
- One-time USD 500 home-office setup
- USD 150 monthly stipend via a Brex Card