Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for various financial instruments. The Senior Fullstack Engineer will work within brokerage operations to automate manual processes, collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance efficiency and reliability through durable software systems.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, test, deploy, and monitor production automations and UIs that remove manual steps and reduce operation time
- Partner with frontend engineers to productize ops tooling so global teams can run functions with predictable staffing
- Execute operational procedures to surface painful manual processes prior to automation
- Instrument and report baseline and outcome metrics (MTTC, manual-steps removed, queue sizes, ops satisfaction) and iterate based on measured impact
- Produce Platform Opportunity Briefs / RFCs for higher-level platform tooling and automations
- Collaborate with licensed BD leadership, Compliance, and Security to build auditable, safe automations with role-based access and clear runbooks
- Own the full lifecycle of the systems you build, including automated deployment (CI/CD with tools like ArgoCD and Terraform), proactive monitoring, On-call support rotations and incident response, following a "you build it, you run it" philosophy
- Build systems with auditability, traceability, and data lineage as a first-class concern to ensure transparency for our auditors and regulators
Requirements:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping and operating complex, large-scale systems in production
- Strong business sense and understanding of operations
- Deep, hands-on expertise in Golang, including a strong command of its concurrency models (goroutines, channels), memory management, and standard library
- Proven track record of building user-facing features end-to-end with Typescript/React
- Proficient with SQL and relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
- Demonstrated ability to reason about human workflows as systems, not just software services
- Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to deconstruct complex requirements into clear technical components and excellent communication skills for working in a cross-functional environment
- High ownership mindset with bias toward durable, structural fixes over tactical patches
- Knowledge of service oriented architectures
- Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
- Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
- A passion for financial markets or the desire to learn
- Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
- Demonstrable experience in designing, building, and reasoning about distributed systems, including a strong understanding of microservices architecture and API design patterns (e.g., REST, gRPC)
- Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking