Senior Software Engineer – Agent Experiences

Overview

Senior Software Engineer to design and ship autonomous execution for agents acting on Alpaca accounts, including account-level policy and the checks on the path in front of trading and risk systems. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with no direct people management.

What you'll do

• Lead the application architecture for safe agent execution, from the tool call through to trading systems.
• Design and build account-level policy and guardrails for external agent actions.
• Own the services that evaluate those rules on the path into trading systems.
• Define how agent-initiated trading actions behave, with the engineers who own tools and skills.
• Keep Alpaca's execution model current with the MCP protocol and with connector, plugin, and skill standards, and translate changes into account policy, guardrails, and trading actions.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, Risk, and the identity platform to define the control model and ship it.
• Own production reliability for the policy and guardrail services.
• Review designs across teams and guide technical decisions where agent actions meet brokerage systems.
• Mentor engineers and raise the quality of design and implementation in this area.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, building and operating production backend systems (evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count).
• Shipped autonomous execution: software that took actions under an explicit policy without a person approving each action, and that rejected or stopped actions outside that policy.
• Designed and implemented account-level policy in an application: durable rules for what a caller may do, enforced on the action path, with an audit of the decision.
• Enough MCP architecture to work with stateless and stateful behavior, and experience building to MCP, or to connector, plugin, or skill standards, as they have changed in production.
• Able to define, with Product, Compliance, and Risk, which account rules allow an unattended action.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript, and a willingness to work primarily in Go.
• Strong architectural judgment, with a record of shipping while requirements are still being defined.
• Clear communication with engineers, product, compliance, and risk partners.

Nice to have

• Experience with agent identity and authorization, such as OAuth, tokens, scopes, and delegated access, and comfort partnering with the team that owns that platform.
• Experience shipping developer-facing tools, SDKs, or MCP servers.
• Experience building agents with a framework such as LangChain.
• Experience or understanding of financial markets.
• Experience working at a startup.
• Experience working remotely.

Details

• Location: Remote - Americas, Europe.