Staff Software Engineer - Platform

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

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, totalling over 10 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.

Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!

We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will own the technical direction of Alpaca's streaming platform - our Redpanda-based event backbone and the user-facing streaming infrastructure. Platform also owns Authentication, Developer Experience and QA, and AI-Native Engineering. Streaming is roughly two-thirds of the job and where we expect you to become the deepest engineer in the company; across the other three you review the designs, hold an informed opinion, and lead the work where they meet streaming.

This is a Staff role, so we are hiring for direction as much as delivery - the engineer who decides what the streaming platform looks like in two years, writes the RFC that gets three teams to agree, and then builds the hard part. We own client-facing and internal services, maintain shared libraries nearly every team depends on, and manage our own deployments. Most of our time goes into Go, but we also write Helm charts, dig through logs and metrics, and get pulled into a wide variety of problems.

Things You Get To Do

Own the architecture of our event streaming platform end to end - Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries and user-facing streaming - and set its two-to-three-year direction

Lead the shift from batch to event-driven across Alpaca's systems, working with the teams who own them rather than around them

Design user-facing streaming at scale: connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering and delivery guarantees, and the failure modes that only show up on a volatile market day

Set the standards for event-driven design - schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency - and own the shared libraries other teams build against, including the cost of versioning and deprecation

Shape AuthN/AuthZ direction across Alpaca and lead the work where identity meets streaming: authorizing real-time subscriptions, token lifecycle on long-lived connections, multi-tenant isolation

Help shape how Alpaca builds with AI - the schemas, contracts and event streams you own are the substrate our agentic development platform runs on

Partner with SRE on chaos testing and game days for the event backbone, and with our QA stream on test tooling and pre-production gates, so resilience is verified rather than assumed

Lead through influence rather than authority, a