Senior Software Engineer - Crypto

Your Role:

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

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.

We are a small team and we move quickly. We collaborate heavily with the rest of engineering at Alpaca, with our operations and accounting teams, and with our support staff. We’d expect you to have a founder mentality and do your best to propose new ideas, solve problems, and generally focus on making the entire team successful. In this role, you’d have significant say in both what we’re doing as well as how we’re doing it.

Things You Get To Do:

• Design highly scalable, mission-critical crypto spot and derivatives exchange trading millions of dollars from day one.
• Build infrastructure that bridges tradfi and crypto through a regulated financial institution used by millions of customers.
• Design and implement stable, scalable backend services written in Golang and deployed on Kubernetes.
• Maintain high software quality and test coverage, with a goal towards continuous improvement through linters, unit tests, and documentation.
• Participate in code reviews — real reviews that help make the whole team better through knowledge sharing, not just rubber-stamp “lgtm”.
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs, and then fix them permanently so we never deal with the same issue twice.
• You may be asked to be on call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature.

Who You Are:

• Product Engineer - someone who can conceive, plan and build products without a product manager. You can talk to customers, spec and design a solution to their problem, put your thoughts on paper and get buy-in from other stakeholders across Alpaca.
• More interested in making our product successful than any specific technical solution that helps us do that. “GSD”.
• At the same time, strongly focused on craft — you like to do good work, and you expect your team to do so as well. You like to learn, and you want your team to continually improve.
• Excellent English communication skills. We work remotely and rely on your ability to express yourself clearly when writing and speaking.
• Based in Europe or otherwise in the general timezone of UTC+0 to UTC+3.
• Experience building a CLOB exchange, HFT, market-making, high-performance matching engines, margin/liquidation engines or other high-throughput & low-latency, regulated, fault-tolerant financial systems.
• Generally interested in working in financial technology and in the crypto space. You don’t need to believe in crypto, but you do need to understand that Alpaca’s business is trading and this team’s business is making it possible to trade crypto assets.
• At least 4 years of experience, ideally with some history as a team lead, a technical lead, an architect role, or a senior engineering role. We’re a small, very experienced team, and we’re looking for someone who can ramp up very quickly.
• Recent experience working with compiled languages like Golang, Rust, or C++.