Senior Software Engineer - New Markets Japan (Japanese proficiency required)

Overview

Senior Engineer on Alpaca's New Markets Japan team, responsible for designing, implementing and maintaining the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation, with a focus on the Japan market.

What you'll do

• Design highly scalable, mission-critical brokerage systems for the Japan market.
• Develop and enhance middle- and back-office systems, including gRPC microservices, REST and gRPC APIs, and third-party vendor integrations specific to the Japan market (e.g. JPX, JSCC, JASDEC, banks, identity verification vendors).
• Work closely with Alpaca's core teams to enhance and transform the core framework, enabling support for multiple languages, currencies and markets, with a particular focus on Japan-specific requirements such as NISA, MyNumber, withholding tax and JP-GAAP accounting.
• Collaborate with tech leads in other regions, synchronously and asynchronously, primarily through Slack and meetings, to align with global teams.
• Coordinate in Japanese with local regulators, vendors, partners and business stakeholders, and translate those requirements into technical specifications for the global engineering team.
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs to maintain system integrity and performance.
• Participate in on-call rotations and assist with engineering projects and production issues during Japan business hours.
• Contribute to regional recruitment initiatives, help drive cross-functional team projects, mentor teammates on engineering principles and practices, and foster Alpaca culture in the Japan region.
• Participate in operational reliability engineering during regional business hours to help ensure 24x7 stability of the platform.

What you'll need

• Business-level or above in Japanese, able to read, write and communicate professionally with local regulators, vendors and partners.
• Business-level English fluency, able to collaborate effectively in English-only team meetings, design discussions, code reviews and written documentation.
• Proven experience designing and developing complex financial systems, preferably including double-entry accounting.
• Strong understanding of accounting principles, ledger structures and transaction reconciliation.
• Experience building scalable, high-availability financial applications that handle multi-currency transactions.
• Familiarity with regulatory compliance requirements in financial markets, with a preference for experience in Japan (FIEA, FSA, JSDA, JIPF or related frameworks).
• Proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g. Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, C#, Scala or C++), with expertise in designing robust and efficient system architectures.
• Experience working with financial APIs, market data integrations and trade settlement processes.
• Strong communication skills to collaborate effectively with global teams, local regulators, vendors and internal stakeholders, bridging Japanese and English contexts.
• Strong computer science fundamentals and proven software engineering architecture experience.
• Ability to work independently in a fully remote, globally distributed team, and under pressure in a fast-paced environment.
• Strategic thinking and the ability to translate technical concepts into business strategies.
• Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven design.
• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset.
• Ability to lead and troubleshoot incidents or bugs with authority during Japan business hours.

Nice to have

• Proficiency in Go, or willingness to ramp up quickly (Go is Alpaca's primary backend language).
• Experience in the Japanese financial services sector (securities firms, banks, brokerages or fintech).
• Hands-on experience integrating with Japan market infrastructure such as JPX (TSE / OSE), JSCC, JASDEC or major Japanese banks.
• Experience with Japan-specific products such as NISA, iDeCo, tokutei-koza or MyNumber handling.
• Experience working in a startup or fast-growing technology company.
• Knowledge of emerging technologies.
• Experience or passion for financial markets.
• Experience managing vendors and organizational budgeting.
• Experience working with global, English-speaking teams across multiple time zones.

Details

• Remote, with the role covering APAC; work across globally distributed teams.
• Participate in on-call rotations and production support during Japan business hours.