About the role

Backend engineer building lending, borrowing, and short-sale systems for Alpaca's global brokerage infrastructure. Owning APIs, batch pipelines, production reliability, and securities-finance products.

Responsibilities

Build and run backend systems supporting Alpaca's lending and borrowing products
Develop systems for Fully Paid Securities Lending and customer short borrowing
Build partner-facing APIs and batch pipelines for new products and revenue
Improve existing systems for noticeable performance and reliability gains
Manage internal functionality supporting brokerage operational processes
Own projects from problem definition through production deployment and ongoing support
Participate in on-call rotations and address root causes of recurring incidents
Learn and apply securities lending, collateral, settlement, and short-selling rules

Solid fundamentals in computers, networks, databases, and distributed systems, especially how each of them fails
3+ years building distributed systems that actually run in production
Productive in Go, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes
Ability to design a good RESTful API and evaluate existing APIs
Seriousness about building systems people trust with their money
Curiosity about how markets work under the hood
Ability to scope, build, ship, and support projects in production
Ability to independently troubleshoot and fix production issues
Attention to detail
Nice-to-have: experience in securities clearing, securities settlement, or securities finance
Nice-to-have: gRPC, Protobuf, Kafka or Redpanda, Grafana, Helm, Docker
Nice-to-have: Temporal
Nice-to-have: familiarity with daily batch jobs, file-based integrations, reconciliation work, broker-dealer operations, Reg SHO, or short-sale rules