Software Engineer, Securities Finance

Overview

Build and run the backend systems behind Alpaca's Securities Finance (SecFi) lending and borrowing products, including fully paid securities lending and customer short borrowing.

What you'll do

• Work with people who care more about clear thinking and getting it right than about tenure or title.
• Own projects from the first conversation about the problem through to what's running in production.
• Build systems that let Alpaca launch new products and new revenue, from partner-facing APIs to batch pipelines that must finish by a fixed time every night.
• Go back into existing systems and make them better when the improvement is one people will actually notice.
• Learn how securities lending, collateral, and settlement work, along with the rules that govern short selling.
• Take your turn on call, and fix root causes when something pages the team often.

What you'll need

• Take it seriously that you build systems people trust with their money.
• Be genuinely curious about how markets actually work under the hood.
• Scope, build, ship, and support a project once it is live.
• Fix things that break when you are the only one around, rather than waiting for whoever wrote the code.
• Tell the difference between a decision that is expensive to reverse and one you can change next month.
• Find out when you don't know something, rather than guessing or faking it.
• Push back when you disagree with a decision, and let it go once it is made.
• Show attention to detail.
• 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, not just in a design doc.
• Productive in Go, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.
• Design a good RESTful API, and tell when someone else's isn't.

Nice to have

• Time spent in securities clearing, securities settlement, or securities finance.
• gRPC, Protobuf, Kafka or Redpanda, Grafana, Helm, Docker.
• Temporal.
• Comfortable with daily batch jobs, file-based integrations, and reconciliation work.
• Some familiarity with broker-dealer operations, Reg SHO, or short-sale rules.

Details

• Remote role in the Americas.
• Competitive salary and stock options.
• Health benefits.
• One-time USD $500 new hire home-office setup.
• Monthly stipend of USD $150 via a Brex Card.