Job Description
Who We Are:
Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24⁄5 trading, and more.
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 10 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 $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.
Our Team Members:
We’re a dynamic team of 400+ 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.
About the Role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Reference Data team, you will build services that form the data backbone of Alpaca’s brokerage infrastructure. Almost every service at Alpaca needs information about the assets it operates on. Our team provides that information and supports the events that affect those assets throughout their lifecycle.
The team owns two core areas: Security Master, the central source of information about tradable assets, their characteristics and whether, when, and how they can be traded; and corporate actions, which involves ingesting third-party information about dividends, stock splits, mergers and other events, then calculating the changes and transactions needed to reflect them in customer and partner holdings.
You will work across both areas, helping Alpaca enter new markets, expand its portfolio of products and improve the reliability, performance and operability of existing systems. This is a hands-on backend engineering role focused on distributed systems, data modelling and correctness across interconnected services. You will take open-ended problems from scoping and design through implementation, rollout and production support, working closely with the teams that depend on reference data.
Things You Get To Do
Design, build and maintain distributed backend services, APIs and data models for Security Master and corporate actions.
Extend reference data systems to support new instruments, asset classes and market-specific requirements, including futures and prediction markets.
Build reliable workflows for ingesting, validating and processing third-party instrument and corporate action information.
Develop internal tools and automation that reduce manual work and improve the reliability of reference data operations.
Help redesign how foundational asset information is structured and shared across Alpaca, contributing to architectural decisions with company-wide impact.
Work closely with engineering and business teams that consume reference data, coordinating changes across services.
Own complex features and technical decisions from design through production, including testing, troubleshooting and continuous improvement.
Who You Are (Must-Haves)
- Strong experience building and operating event-driven, distributed backend systems.
- Strong database and data-modelling skills, with an understanding of eventual consistency and data replication.
- Excellent system design fundamentals, including designing and evolving APIs.
- Proficiency in a strongly typed programming language and willingness to work in Go.
- Experience taking complex or ambiguous problems from initial requirements through delivery and production operation.
- Ability to explain technical decisions and trade-offs clearly, collaborate across teams and reason through cross-system dependencies.
- Senior-level engineering judgement and ownership; we assess capability and impact rather than applying a fixed years-of-experience threshold.
Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)
Experience in trading, brokerage, capital markets, crypto infrastructure or related financial technology.
Experience with reference data, Security Master, instrument or asset data, or corporate action processing.
Understanding of financial instruments, particularly options, futures and other derivatives.
Experience with third-party data ingestion, internal tooling and workflow automation.
Experience guiding other engineers and working across interconnected services and teams.
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.
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