Director of Engineering, Trading

About the role

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. 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 10 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 $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role:

Alpaca is building the next-generation market infrastructure that powers the most sophisticated institutional use cases and expands its API-driven platform to support complex, high-performance "agentic" trading strategies. This strategic expansion ensures a robust and reliable foundation for all active traders, while tailoring our industry-leading brokerage platform to meet the demanding needs of institutional investors.

Reporting to the CPO/CTO/OCTO [TBD] , you will build and scale a focused engineering organization responsible for institutional trading capabilities across multiple asset classes. You will work closely with the Global Head of Brokerage and other senior leaders to evolve Alpaca’s platform toward a multi-asset, cross-margining offering spanning FX, futures, and other derivatives alongside existing equities and options.

This role is designed for a Director-level engineering leader who can extend a proven brokerage platform into a new institutional tier through strong architectural judgment, execution discipline, and team leadership.

Things You Get To Do:

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.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

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

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

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

Experience contributing to architecture standards or externally visible technical initiatives

Prior experience scaling trading platforms during periods of rapid growth

How We Take Care of You:

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

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

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