Key Skills

Job Description

Your Role: As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets. The identity team is responsible for building a modern platform for onboarding users, verifying their identity, evaluating risk, and managing their trading accounts. These people, businesses, and accounts are foundational components of the Alpaca system, and we need to build new capabilities while achieving very high automation rates. We are expanding the platform to handle identity verification on a global basis and to support our growing set of account types. We are looking for senior engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, have proven experience building and architecting at scale, and are not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices is also a great asset we are actively looking for. Things You Get To Do: Contribute to a core system that millions of end users will rely onHelp us create a global financial identity verification and risk management serviceImplement backend services and work on designing an architecture where reliability mattersTake ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutionsContribute to architectural decisions, offering insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systemsWork with other teams to improve how our systems interact with theirs and improve Alpaca systems in generalMaintain good software quality and test coverageParticipate in code reviewsTroubleshooting on incidents and reported bugsYou may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature Who You Are (Must-Haves): Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindsetAbility to turn business requirements into a flexible implementation modelExcellent communication and collaboration skillsAbility to work independently and as part of a teamA preference for simple and elegant solutionsAt least 3 years of experience working on systems at scaleProven experience in building and maintaining microservicesStrong coding skills, preferably in GoAbility to write clean, well-tested, and maintainable codeExperience with domain-driven design and event-driven designAbility to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirelyFamiliarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially KubernetesExperience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud PlatformExperience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves): Experience in the finance industryExperience with financial identity management, e.g. KYCExperience with messaging queues and message brokersExperience integrating with external servicesExperience working remotelyExperience working at a startupDevOps mindset is an asset

Core Responsibilities

Build and scale backend services for global identity verification, risk management, onboarding, and trading account systems, with a focus on reliable architecture. Take ownership of technical challenges, contribute to architectural decisions and code reviews, improve cross-team system interactions, maintain software quality, and troubleshoot incidents and bugs.

Requirements

Candidates should have at least three years of experience working on systems at scale, proven experience building and maintaining microservices, and strong coding skills, preferably in Go. They should also be familiar with domain-driven and event-driven design, Kubernetes, cloud platforms—preferably Google Cloud Platform—and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, and be able to write clean, tested, maintainable code.