Job Description:
• Define and own 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 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, execution systems, real-time risk, margin engines, and analytics platforms
• 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 VP-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.
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