Your Role:

Your job is to lead the team building Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy our users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service. You will design and architect our platform by wearing many different hats in a small team. As a Team Lead you will still write code and make critical technical decisions, but you are also accountable for how the team works: what it builds, how it prioritizes, how it grows, and how reliably it ships.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a pure management role. We expect you to stay close to the code and the system, and to spend a meaningful part of your time in the codebase, in design reviews, and on production issues. At the same time you will own the team's roadmap, its delivery, and the development of the engineers on it.

The technical bar for this role is the same as our Senior/Staff Software Engineer bar: deep knowledge in both frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, as well as broad experience from low to high level in CPU-level hardware for high throughput, robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability and object-oriented data modeling with long term growth in mind.

You must have previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading), and previous experience leading engineers.

What you will own:

• Technical direction and architecture for the team's services, including trade-off decisions and their long term consequences
• Roadmap and delivery: breaking down ambiguous business goals into scoped, sequenced engineering work and shipping it predictably
• Day-to-day execution: sprint or cycle planning, unblocking engineers, keeping work in flight visible to stakeholders
• Code and design quality: setting the standard through reviews, design docs, and your own contributions
• Production ownership: reliability, latency and correctness targets for the team's systems, on-call health, and incident follow-through
• People: hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, feedback, performance and career growth for a small team of engineers
• Cross-team collaboration with product, operations, compliance, clearing and the other engineering teams

Requirements:

• Strong, experienced software engineer at a senior or staff level who has led a team, formally or as a tech lead
• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: mentoring, feedback, and raising the level of people around you
• Track record of delivering complex systems on schedule, including scoping, sequencing and cutting the right things
• Coding skills in both low and high level languages around C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python
• Low latency and high throughput optimization
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
• Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems and concurrency control
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)
• Clear written and verbal communication, including with non-engineering stakeholders
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and limited process, as expected at an early stage startup

Nice to have:

• Experience hiring and building out an engineering team from a small base
• Experience owning a production trading or brokerage system as the accountable lead
• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
• Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience working with distributed, remote-first teams across time zones