What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer - Platform position at Alpaca?
Your Role:
As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets.
The platform team is responsible for improving Alpaca's overall internal architecture and overseeing the public API’s structure. The team is responsible for building a cohesive developer-first API and tasked with building, ideating, experimenting, and productionize new services, internal tooling and libraries that overcome some of our greatest technical challenges as we continue to scale rapidly,
We are looking for senior or staff engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, have proven experience building and architecting at scale, and are not afraid of challenging conventions. This demanding team also requires a deep understanding of POSIX, such as operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices.
Things You Get To Do:
- Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s systems
- Design a highly scalable, mission-critical brokerage system.
- Obsess over latency (every nanosecond counts)
- Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matter.
- Maintain good software quality and test coverage
- Participate in code reviews
- Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
- You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature
Who You Are (Must-Haves):
- At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
- Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (ex: Go, C, C , Rust, Zig) or functional languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang, Elixir, Scala). Most of our critical services are written in Go
- SQL or relational database skills
- Familiarity with message brokers and message queues
- Proficient with Linux/BSD, shell scripting.
- Excited about what we are building at Alpaca
- Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams
- Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)
- Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
- A passion for financial markets
Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):
- Knowledge of microservice architectures
- Knowledge of clean code principles
- DevOps mindset is an asset
- Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering, TCP/UDP)
- Experience with distributed Key Value stores
- Experience with CI/CD
- A passion for financial markets or the desire to learn
- Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
- Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling
- Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking
- Knowledge of eBPF
