Director of Engineering, Trading

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 9 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it.

### Your Role: - Define and own and execute the engineering roadmap for Alpaca’s institutional trading platform - Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of engineers with a strong culture of ownership and execution - Partner with the Office of the CTO and Global Head of Brokerage to align engineering priorities with institutional and prime brokerage strategy - Lead the evolution toward a multi-asset trading architecture supporting cross-margining across equities, options, FX, futures, and other derivatives - Design and deliver institutional trading capabilities, including but not limited to: - Drive architectural decisions across trading APIs, our proprietary order management system, real-time risk, and margin engines - Set and enforce technical standards for performance, availability, scalability, and operational resilience in latency-sensitive systems - Coordinate multiple concurrent initiatives across trading, risk, margin, asset classes, and customer-facing tooling - Work cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, Operations, and Finance to deliver production-ready systems - Represent institutional trading engineering in executive-level planning and decision-making - Provide technical and architectural thought leadership in trading and brokerage technology, influencing direction internally and through industry engagement - Hands-on engineering, such as writing PoC code, conducting code reviews, deploying to production, and providing an L3 escalation contact point.

### Who You Are (Must-Haves): - A Director-level (or above) engineering leader with experience owning critical, market-facing platforms - Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams focused on complex, high-impact systems - Deep understanding of institutional trading and brokerage technology, including execution systems, risk and margin platforms, and trading analytics - Experience designing or operating systems that support cross-asset risk and margining across multiple asset classes - Strong architectural judgment and the ability to balance speed, reliability, and control in regulated environments - Deep knowledge of OS fundamentals and distributed systems, sufficient to set architectural direction and evaluate designs for performance-critical trading systems. - Effective partner to senior business, brokerage, and product leaders - Clear communicator with technical and non-technical stakeholders

### How We Take Care of You: - Competitive Salary & Stock Options - Health Benefits - New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500 - Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

Alpaca is a global leader in brokerage infrastructure APIs, providing access to stocks, ETFs, options, fixed income, and crypto, along with embeddable finance solutions like tokenization and securities lending. It serves retail traders, institutional investors, app developers, and fintech companies worldwide through its API-first platform. The company, originally started in 2015 as a database and machine learning firm, is headquartered in San Mateo, California.