Staff Software Engineer - Margin & Risk
Alpaca · Remote - Americas or EU
About this role
**Staff Software Engineer — Margin & Risk (Prime Engine)** **About Alpaca** Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. We serve hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs—supporting broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges (10M+ brokerage accounts). **About the Role** We’re seeking a **Staff Software Engineer** to lead the technical direction of our **Margin & Risk** team. This team builds systems that protect Alpaca, partners, and their customers from financial exposure across every asset class the platform supports—today equities, options, and crypto, and new asset classes as we expand. You’ll work across the domain (not a single product line), including: - Portfolio & intraday margin - Options risk - Crypto risk controls - Margin models for new products This is a **high-consequence** domain: defects can cause financial loss, incorrectly restrict customer trading, or create regulatory exposure. **Latency and correctness both matter**. You won’t manage people directly. You’ll lead through **architecture, code/design reviews, mentorship**, and remain a **principal contributor** on mission-critical systems. The team is ~6 engineers today and scaling toward 10. --- **Key Responsibilities** - Own the **architecture and technical roadmap** for margin and risk across asset classes (portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and new asset-class margin models). - Design and build services that translate complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into **correct, testable, observable** systems—keeping rules consistent where asset classes interact. - Lead **real-time risk enforcement** on the order path, balancing **latency vs. accuracy/safety**. - Drive **reliability and performance**: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation. - Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries. - Set the standard for correctness in financial systems: **transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, staged rollouts**. - Lead design reviews, mentor senior/mid-level engineers, and raise the engineering bar as the team grows. - Serve as a technical escalation point for production margin/risk issues and drive durable prevention after incidents. --- **Qualifications** - **8+ years** backend or distributed-systems experience (scope/ownership matters more than exact year count). Strong preference for owning the same consequential production system for **2+ years**. - Proven ownership of a high-volume system where defects could cause **financial loss**, **data-integrity failures**, or **inappropriate customer restrictions**. - Experience designing and shipping **transactional, low-latency, high-throughput** systems. - Strong expertise in **Go** (or deep experience in Java/C++/Rust with a clear willingness to work primarily in Go). - Deep knowledge of **relational databases** (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency. - Experience with **event-driven/service-oriented systems** (gRPC/RPC, Kafka/RabbitMQ or similar) and **Kubernetes**. - Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case
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