Alpaca - Staff Software Engineer - Margin & Risk
Requirements
• 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years. • Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, a data-integrity failure, or an inappropriate customer restriction. • Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems. • Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust and a clear willingness to work primarily in Go. Domain knowledge matters more than prior time in Go. • Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency. • Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC or other RPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and with Kubernetes. • Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout. • Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when the business rules are complex or still being defined. • Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams. Curious about the core of the domain, and effective as a teammate. • Hands-on margin or risk experience in more than one asset class, with derivatives or recently launched markets especially valuable. You would help establish and deepen that expertise on the team. • Familiarity with margin methodologies such as Reg T, portfolio margin, options spread margin, or futures margin. • Background in brokerage, clearing, exchange, ledger, payments, or settlement systems. • Experience with options, derivatives, or multi-leg strategies and their risk characteristics. • Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) for long-running processes such as margin-call lifecycles. • Experience with observability and production performance tuning. • Experience leading migrations or refactors in production-critical environments. • How We Take Care of You: • 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. • Recruitment Privacy Policy
Responsibilities
• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes, including portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and margin models for new asset classes. • Design and build services that turn complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, and observable systems, and keep those rules consistent where asset classes interact. • Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path, balancing latency against accuracy and safety. • Drive reliability and performance across the team's services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation. • Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries. • Set the standard for correctness in a financial system: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts. • Lead design reviews, mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the engineering bar as the team grows. • Act as a technical point of escalation for production margin and risk issues, and drive durable prevention after incidents.
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. • Recruitment Privacy Policy
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