Senior Business Architect

Job description

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: We're seeking a Senior Business Architect (Canada) for ACCC: someone who can go deep on brokerage operations across accounts, trading, clearing, settlement, custody, and asset servicing, and can turn that operating knowledge into clear requirements and turn that into clear requirements Product and Engineering can build. You are the bridge between how the Canadian brokerage actually works and the product roadmap. You lead structured discovery with counterparts and work out how partner firms, account opening, clearing, custody, and day-to-day operations fit together, then write that down as epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, and open decisions. Success is measured by: requirements and designs teams can build without guessing; a clear split between what the system does and what people still do at launch; solution options that Product and Engineering can sequence; and a backlog tied to ACCC milestones and capabilities. What You'll Walk Into You won't be starting from zero. You'll be owning live problems: • Operations scope: defining what ACCC must support across accounts, trading, clearing, settlement, custody, books and records, and asset servicing. • Partner firm handoffs: what partners send us, what we send back, and who does what across accounts, trades, cash, and securities. • Account and trade lifecycle: account opening, settlement in Canada through CDS, failed trades, transfers, and corporate actions such as dividends and splits. • Platform gap analysis: comparing today's Alpaca platform with Canadian brokerage operations requirements to decide what we reuse, change, or build. • Launch scope: separating what must work on day one from what follows, including registered accounts (TFSA, RRSP, RESP), more products, and more partner services. • Open decisions: logging each one with an owner so it gets closed or consciously deferred. What you’ll own Requirements across ACCC’s brokerage operations, and what comes next: • Map brokerage operations end to end across these areas: broker onboarding, account carrying, trade clearing/settlement, custody of cash/securities, books & records, financing (if in scope), corporate actions, transfers, exceptions, and reporting • Help define target operating models and capability designs: what the platform must do, what stays manual (for now), what is control vs. feature, what is Canada-specific vs. reusable globally <l