Senior Software Engineer - Market Data at Alpaca

Role Overview

Alpaca is hiring a Senior Software Engineer on the Market Data team to design and build highly scalable, low-latency systems powering market data for stocks, options, crypto, and FX. You will influence architecture, implement backend services, and optimize streaming and historical endpoints for a developer-first public API used by millions of accounts.

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and developer-first brokerage infrastructure powering trading for institutions and retail developers. Backed by leading investors and serving millions of accounts, Alpaca focuses on open-source contributions and building robust, high-performance data and API products.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture - Influence the architecture of Alpaca’s market data systems, including streaming and historical endpoints and public API structure.
• Design & build - Design and implement highly scalable, mission-critical backend services with attention to latency and resilience.
• Performance - Obsess over latency and throughput, optimize systems, and implement performance tuning and benchmarking.
• Operational quality - Maintain strong test coverage, participate in code reviews, troubleshoot incidents, and assist on-call rotations when needed.
• Collaboration - Work with multiple teams to deliver cohesive APIs, libraries, and services that solve technical challenges as Alpaca scales.

Who You Are

• At least 4 years of experience building systems at scale.
• Proficiency with compiled imperative languages such as Go, C, C++ or Rust, with Go used extensively in Alpaca's critical services.
• Strong SQL or relational database skills and familiarity with distributed key-value stores.
• Deep understanding of TCP/IP and UDP networking, Linux/BSD systems, and shell scripting.
• Experience with Kubernetes orchestration (GKE), cloud platforms (GCP preferred), and CI/CD practices.
• Passion for financial markets and building low-latency, reliable systems.

Nice to Haves

• Knowledge of microservice architectures, clean code principles, and eBPF.
• Experience with cloud networking like BGP or VPC peering, observability, tracing, and continuous profiling.
• Experience with capacity planning, benchmarking, and building developer-facing SDKs or libraries.

Location & Work Model

Remote - North America with Eastern Hours alignment. Engineers should be able to work Eastern timezone hours for collaboration.

Compensation & Benefits

Alpaca offers competitive salary and stock options, plus benefits such as health coverage and support for remote work.

• Health Insurance - comprehensive health benefits.
• Stock Options - participation in equity programs.
• Home Office Setup - one-time new hire setup reimbursement.
• Monthly Stipend - monthly remote work stipend.

Why Join

Work on core market data infrastructure that serves millions of users and enables high-performance trading. Join a fast-growing, mission-driven engineering organization focused on reliability, latency, and developer experience.

How to Apply

Apply via the Alpaca careers posting. Provide your resume, GitHub or code samples, and details about relevant low-latency or market data projects you have led or contributed to.