Alpaca - Staff Fullstack Engineer
Requirements
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time on both backend services and customer-facing applications. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count. • Proven ownership of a production system where a defect could expose customer data, grant the wrong access, or cause financial loss. • Deep experience with authentication and authorization: OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, session and token management, MFA, and role- or attribute-based permission models. • Strong backend expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, Kotlin, C#, or Rust and a clear willingness to work primarily in Go. • Strong frontend experience with TypeScript and React, including complex, state-heavy applications. Experience with real-time data over WebSockets or other streaming protocols is strongly preferred. • Solid knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), API design (REST and gRPC), and service-oriented systems running on Kubernetes. • Demonstrated care for correctness and security: threat modelling, testing strategy, edge-case analysis, and safe production rollout. • Clear communication with engineers, designers, product managers, and compliance and security partners, including when requirements are ambiguous or still being defined. • Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams. Product-minded: you care what the customer sees and why, and you are effective as a teammate. • Experience building trading, brokerage, or other financial applications: order entry, positions and P&L, charting, or real-time market data. • Experience with identity platforms or building identity in-house (for example, Amazon Cognito, Keycloak, or Auth0), passkeys and WebAuthn, or delegated access for third-party applications. • Experience with API platforms and developer products: API keys, scopes, rate limits, SDKs, or developer dashboards. • Experience with agentic AI integrations, such as MCP servers or tooling that lets AI agents act safely on a user's behalf. • Familiarity with FIX or institutional trading workflows. • Experience leading migrations off a legacy monolith 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 how customers access and use Trading API: identity and authentication, authorization and permissions, account and sub-account models, partner OAuth, and customer-facing trading and account-management applications. • Design the access model for increasingly complex account structures — multiple users per account, sub-accounts, entity and advisor accounts, and delegated API and agent access — so that permissions are explicit, auditable, and enforced on the server. • Lead technical delivery of next-generation Trading API customer applications, including real-time market data, order entry, and positions and order views, as the product expands to new customer surfaces. • Drive the move from legacy monolith endpoints to a dedicated application backend, with clear API contracts between customer applications and platform services such as trading, accounts, transfers, ledger, and market data. • Set the security bar for customer-facing systems: session and credential handling, MFA and passkeys, OAuth flows, rate limiting, input validation, and fast, durable responses to security findings. • Set the standard for safe delivery: feature flags, staged rollouts, preview environments, testing strategy, and production observability. • Partner with Product, Design, Compliance, Security, Brokerage Operations, and adjacent engineering teams to define behaviour and integration boundaries. • 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 issues on customer-facing Trading API systems, 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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