Lead Software Engineer - New Markets

Your Role:

As the engineering tech lead for new market initiatives, you will be responsible for building a talented group of software engineers in Japan who will be members of our functional product and infrastructure engineering teams and able to work together across functional boundaries on high-growth initiatives. You will be responsible for regional recruitment initiatives, leading cross-functional team projects, mentoring talent with respect to our engineering principles and practices, and fostering Alpaca culture in the region. As the lead, you will also ensure operational reliability engineering and incident commander during regional business hours to ensure proactive 24x7 stability.

For this role, we are seeking an experienced engineering leader 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. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices are also great assets we actively look for.

Things You Get To Do:

• Lead and mentor a team of software engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment.

• Provide technical guidance and support, ensuring the team's adherence to best practices and development standards.

• Collaborate with stakeholders, including finance, operations, and product teams, to understand and define requirements.

• Design and implement backend solutions where reliability, scalability, and regulatory compliance matter.

• Communicate project statuses, challenges, and solutions effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Collaborate with tech leads in other regions both synchronously and asynchronously, using Slack and occasional meetings outside of regular working hours to align with global teams.

• Engage with local regulators, vendors, and the broker operations team to ensure the development of a robust and scalable system that complies with local market regulations.

• Work closely with Alpaca’s core teams to enhance and transform the core framework, enabling support for multiple languages, currencies, and markets.

• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs to maintain system integrity and performance.

• Thrive in a global environment, effectively navigating regulatory requirements and building scalable solutions to support Alpaca’s international growth.

• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with timely engineering projects.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Proven experience in designing and developing complex financial systems, preferably including double-entry accounting.

• Strong understanding of accounting principles, ledger structures, and transaction reconciliation.

• Experience in building scalable, high-availability financial applications that handle multi-currency transactions.

• Familiarity with regulatory compliance requirements in financial markets.

• Proficiency in Go or similar backend languages, with expertise in designing robust and efficient system architectures.

• Experience working with financial APIs, market data integrations, and trade settlement processes.

• Strong communication skills to collaborate effectively with global teams, local regulators, vendors, and internal stakeholders.

• Strong computer science fundamentals and proven software engineering architecture experience

• Ability to work independently and under pressure in a fast-paced environment

• Strategic thinking and the ability to translate technical concepts into business strategies.

• Strong familiarity with the software development life cycle

• Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven design

• Obsession with performant, defect-free, maintainable code

• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset

• The ability to work independently and as part of a team

• A preference for simple and elegant solutions

• Ability to act as incident commander and lead and troubleshoot incidents or bugs with authority.

Who You Might Be (Nice-To-Haves):

• Experience in the financial service sector

• Experience working in a startup or fast-growing technology company.

• Knowledge of emerging technologies

• Experience or passion for financial markets

• Experience managing vendors and organizational budgeting

• Experience working with global teams