Director of Engineering, Trading

Who We Are: 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, totalling 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. Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

About the 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

Requirements

• 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

Qualifications

• Experience with algorithmic trading systems across multiple asset classes
• Exposure to portfolio margin or cross-margining methodologies
• Background supporting hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, or other institutional clients
• Prior experience scaling trading platforms during periods of rapid growth

Benefits

• 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

Pay

Competitive salary and stock options.

Schedule

Flexible work schedule.