Senior Software Engineer - Risk

About Alpaca

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.

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.

Responsibilities

• Risk and financial controls — Experience building automated controls, rules engines, monitoring, alerting, case management, or exception-handling workflows that help identify and mitigate financial and operational risk.
• AML and fraud systems — Experience supporting transaction monitoring, fraud detection, suspicious activity identification, customer/account controls, or related compliance workflows.
• Clearing and brokerage operations — Familiarity with trading and post-trade workflows, including clearing, settlement, reconciliations, positions, balances, money movement, or exception management.
• Build scalable financial controls and systems — Design, build, and maintain reliable systems that support Risk, AML, Fraud, Clearing, and Operations across the business.
• Develop automated controls and safeguards — Build real-time and near-real-time controls, alerts, and enforcement mechanisms to identify and mitigate financial, compliance, fraud, and operational risks.
• Partner cross-functionally — Work closely with Risk, Compliance, AML, Fraud, Clearing, Operations, Product, and Engineering to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Build monitoring and investigation tooling — Develop dashboards, alerting, investigation tools, and internal systems that provide visibility into transactions, exposures, exceptions, suspicious activity, and operational issues.
• Automate critical operational workflows — Transform manual processes across Risk, AML, Fraud, Clearing, and Operations into scalable, efficient, and auditable workflows.
• Investigate and prevent incidents — Support the investigation and resolution of financial, fraud, clearing, and operational incidents; perform root-cause analysis and build solutions that reduce recurrence.
• Ensure resilient and auditable systems — Build critical controls and operational systems that are reliable, observable, testable, performant, and resilient while maintaining the auditability required in a regulated financial environment.

Requirements

• Financial services domain experience — Experience building systems within brokerage, fintech, banking, payments, or another regulated financial environment, with exposure to areas such as Risk, AML, Fraud, Clearing, or Operations.
• Operational automation — Experience turning manual, high-volume operational processes into scalable, reliable, and auditable systems and internal tooling.
• Data-intensive systems — Experience working with large and complex financial datasets, building pipelines and services used for monitoring, investigations, reconciliation, reporting, and decision-making.
• Cross-functional engineering — Demonstrated ability to work directly with Risk, Compliance, Fraud, Clearing, and Operations teams to understand complex business problems and translate them into robust technical solutions.
• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• The ability to work independently and as part of a team
• A preference for simple and elegant solutions
• At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale

Proven experience in building and maintaining microservices

• Ability to write clean, well tested, and maintainable code
• Experience with domain driven design and event driven design
• Ability to debug issues or better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Experience with distributed systems design

Preferred

• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
• Experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL

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.