Who you are

- 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years

- Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, a data-integrity failure, or an inappropriate customer restriction

- Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems

- Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust and a transparent willingness to work primarily in Go. Domain knowledge matters more than prior time in Go

- Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency

- Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC or other RPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and with Kubernetes

- Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout

- Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when the business rules are complex or still being defined

- Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams. Curious about the core of the domain, and effective as a teammate

- Hands-on margin or risk experience in more than one asset class, with derivatives or recently launched markets especially valuable. You would help establish and deepen that expertise on the team

- Familiarity with margin methodologies such as Reg T, portfolio margin, options spread margin, or futures margin

- Background in brokerage, clearing, exchange, ledger, payments, or settlement systems

- Experience with options, derivatives, or multi-leg strategies and their risk characteristics

- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) for long-running processes such as margin-call lifecycles





- Experience with observability and production performance tuning

- Experience leading migrations or refactors in production-critical environments

What the job involves

- We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our Margin & Risk team, part of Prime Engine. The team builds the systems that protect Alpaca, our partners, and their customers from financial exposure across every asset class the platform supports — equities, options, and crypto today, and new asset classes as the platform expands

- These systems calculate margin requirements, enforce real-time risk and exposure limits, manage margin calls through their full lifecycle, and automate operational workflows that were historically manual or split across fragmented services

- This role is expected to work across those asset classes, not own a single product line: portfolio and intraday margin, options risk, crypto risk controls, and the margin models for new products as they come online. Exposure is often cross-asset, so the architecture has to treat a customer's risk as one picture

- This is a high-consequence domain. A defect can cause financial loss, incorrectly restrict a customer's trading, or create regulatory exposure. Latency matters, and correctness matters more. We are looking for an engineer who has owned systems like this before — including what happens when they fail — and who has built that kind of system, not only operated one someone else designed

- You will not manage people directly. You will lead through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship,



and you will remain a principal contributor on mission-critical systems. The team is about six engineers today and is scaling toward ten

- You will be the senior technical anchor for the domain, working with the engineering manager and the senior engineers on the team to spread deep ownership as it grows

- Own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes, including portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and margin models for new asset classes

- Design and build services that turn complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, and observable systems, and keep those rules consistent where asset classes interact

- Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path, balancing latency against accuracy and safety

- Drive reliability and performance across the team's services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation

- Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries

- Set the standard for correctness in a financial system: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts

- Lead design reviews, mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the engineering bar as the team grows

- Act as a technical point of escalation for production margin and risk issues, and drive durable prevention after incidents

Benefits

- Stock Options
- Health benefits from day 1 (internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs)

- Recent Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500

- Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

- Work with awesome people, clients and partners from around the world

- Medical, Dental, Vision

- Supplemental health care

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Canada)
🏢 Alpaca
📍 Canada