Your Role:

As a Senior Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users who are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The Ledger Team is responsible for building a modern ledger system, whose purpose is to maintain a complete and correct view of everything that has ever happened in every account. From a business perspective, the ledger provides a structured and organized system for recording and aggregating transactional data. It plays a crucial role in supporting financial reporting, decision-making, and compliance. From an engineering perspective, the ledger serves as the source of truth for many services in the Alpaca ecosystem.

For this role, we are seeking an experienced engineer who is obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, has proven experience architecting and building at scale, and who is 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 in cooperation with a cross-functional team.

Things You Get To Do:

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders–including finance, operations, and product teams–to deliver high-impact features/projects
• Build backend systems/components with integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability in mind
• Own the delivery of high-visibility features/projects, from design to deployment
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve the health of Alpaca’s systems

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• A seasoned engineer with 5+ years of experience working on systems at scale
• Obsessed with performant, defect-free, maintainable code
• A strong problem solver with a proactive mindset
• A collaborator who is capable of creating alignment with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike
• Comfortable working heads-down or tag-teaming problems
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Ability to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
• Experience with IDLs (e.g., protobuf), RPC frameworks (e.g., gRPC), cloud platforms (e.g., GCP), and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) 

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):  

• Experience in the financial services or accounting industry
• Experience with distributed systems/databases
• Experience with event-driven systems and messaging brokers (e.g., Redpanda)
• Experience working remotely
• Experience working at a startup