What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer - Trading position at Alpaca?
Your Role:
Alpaca is a next generation securities broker for algo traders. With a clear vision and the right timing, we are a growing FinTech startup tapping into a new market in retail trading. Our target users are tech savvy and analytical problem solvers who appreciate a modern technology stack and an innovative business model that helps to empower them to move beyond old school financial services. We look for engineers who think the same way.
Your job is to build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy our users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service. This opportunity is similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their early days, designing and architecting our platform by wearing many different hats in our small team. As an experienced engineer, you will write tons of code and make critical decisions about delivering the best experience to our customers. This certainly requires deep knowledge in both frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, as well as broad experience from low to high level in CPU-level hardware for high throughput, robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability and object-oriented data modeling with long term growth in mind. Joining an early stage startup, the payoff to this highly demanding environment will be worth the effort.
You must have previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading).
Requirements:
- Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience is preferred
- Coding skills in both low and high level languages around C/C , Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python
- Low latency and high throughput optimization
- Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
- Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
- Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems and concurrency control
- System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
- Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)
Nice to have:
- Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
- FIX protocol knowledge
- Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
- Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
- Experience with financial ledgers
- Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
- Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
