Staff Software Engineer

This role acts as the technical owner of Alpaca's APIs-both internal and external-ensuring they are consistent, reliable, secure, and easy to evolve. You will define standards, guide architectural decisions, and own critical orchestration and aggregation services that power Alpaca's applications.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with a strong architectural focus. While you won't be writing every line of code, you will contribute to shared frameworks, review designs, and own key application-level services.

Things You Get To Do:

• Drive Alpaca's API design principles and governance across internal and external APIs.
• Lead application-layer architecture, including orchestration and aggregation services.
• Own and evolve critical services powering application experiences (e.g., portfolio history, account views).
• Define standards for API versioning, security, backward compatibility, and documentation.
• Drive best practices for observability, performance, and reliability at the application layer.
• Partner with platform engineering on service templates and shared infrastructure.
• Review API and architectural designs across teams and guide complex technical decisions.
• Contribute to shared frameworks, libraries, and tooling.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the bar for backend and API craftsmanship.

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including Staff-level technical leadership.
• Strong expertise in API design and distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Golang or Java (or equivalent backend experience).
• Experience with service orchestration, aggregation patterns, and BFF architectures.
• Deep understanding of observability and operational excellence.
• Experience in defining and influencing engineering standards across teams.
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to balance long-term design with delivery.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset.
• Familiarity with frontend systems (React/TypeScript) and API consumption patterns.
• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal).

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

• Experience or understanding of financial markets.
• Experience working at a startup.
• Experience working remotely.

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 9 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it. Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Our Team Members: We're a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values-Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable-and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.