Senior Software Engineer

Who We Are:
Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:
We're a dynamic team of 230+ 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.

Your Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Tax Platform Engineering team, you will architect, build, and scale the mission-critical systems that ensure accuracy, verifiability, and compliance for our global tax obligations. You will be responsible for engineering the durable systems of record that serve as the definitive source of truth for our financial operations, directly mitigating financial risk and ensuring auditable adherence to complex financial laws in a high-volume, regulated environment

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate highly scalable, resilient, and secure microservices and data processing systems using idiomatic Golang.
• Model complex, long-running tax reporting business logic as durable, stateful workflows using Temporal to ensure correctness and reliability.
• Implement and optimize data pipelines consuming financial events from Redpanda, ensuring data quality, timeliness, and integrity.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams of tax analysts, legal experts, and product managers to translate complex and evolving regulatory requirements into robust, maintainable, and verifiable software solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, driving best practices in distributed system design, API definition with gRPC, code quality, and advanced testing strategies.
• Build systems with auditability, traceability, and data lineage as a first-class concern to ensure transparency for our auditors and regulators.
• Own the full lifecycle of your services, including automated deployment (CI/CD with tools like Jenkins and Terraform), proactive monitoring, and incident response, following a "you build it, you run it" philosophy.

Technical Environment:

• Backend Services:
  Microservices written in Golang for performance, simplicity, and concurrency.
• API Communication:
  gRPC with Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) for high-performance, strongly-typed, and versionable service-to-service APIs.
• Workflow Orchestration:
  Temporal for durable execution of long-running, auditable business logic workflows.
• Streaming Data:
  Redpanda as a high-throughput, low-latency, Kafka-compatible streaming platform for all tax-relevant financial events.
• Infrastructure:
  Cloud platforms (AWS), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Observability:
  Modern monitoring and observability tools include Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog.

Must-Haves:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping and operating complex, large-scale systems in production.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in Golang, including a strong command of its concurrency models (goroutines, channels), memory management, and standard library.
• 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).
• 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.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Hands-on experience with Temporal or similar durable execution systems like Cadence or AWS Step Functions.
• Experience with Redpanda or Apache Kafka, with a solid understanding of the Kafka protocol.
• Production experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers (Protobuf).
• Proficiency with AWS, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins).
• Experience with modern observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and distributed tracing systems.
• Prior experience in FinTech, RegTech, or another highly regulated industry with familiarity with financial data or compliance systems.

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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