Staff Software Engineer - New Markets Singapore/SEA

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: As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible for architecting, designing, and implementing the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets. You will serve as a technical leader with extensive influence that goes beyond the immediate team to affect the entire product's technical direction. You will be the founding technical lead for Singapore and the broader SEA region: leading regional recruitment, leading cross-functional projects, mentoring talent on our engineering principles and practices, and fostering Alpaca culture in the region. As the lead, you will also serve as the operational reliability and engineering lead and the incident commander during regional business hours, ensuring proactive 24x7 stability. For this role, we are seeking a backend engineer who has built the middle- and back-office systems that are a broker-dealer's system of record — customer account management and KYC, pre-trade controls such as buying-power validation, post-trade processing, double-entry ledgers and books-and-records, clearing and settlement, custody, corporate actions, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting — for a firm serving end investors. This is not a front-office trading-systems role: experience limited to sell-side market-making, low-latency/high-frequency execution, quantitative trading strategy, or exchange-side trading infrastructure is not sufficient on its own. The ideal candidate has a track record of architecting solutions that span multiple products or services, acts as a mentor and consultant providing strategic technical insights, and can take a platform into new markets repeatedly as Alpaca expands across SEA. Things You Get To Do: • Architect and design highly scalable, mission-critical brokerage systems spanning multiple products or services. • Develop and enhance middle- and back-office systems, including gRPC microservices, APIs, and third-party vendor integrations. • Build customer account/PII systems, KYC/CDD/AML controls, and pre-trade multi-currency buying-power and margin engines. • Partner with core teams to extend frameworks for regional languages,