Staff Engineer / Team Lead - Identity

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 230+ 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 team lead, you will drive building and scaling the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets.

The identity team is responsible for building a modern platform for onboarding users, verifying their identity, evaluating risk, and managing their trading accounts. These people, businesses, and accounts are foundational components of the Alpaca system, and we need to build new capabilities while achieving very high automation rates. We are expanding the platform to handle identity verification on a global basis and to support our growing set of account types.

We are looking for a staff engineer level Team Lead who is keen on providing quality solutions, has proven experience building and architecting at scale, and is not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices is also a great asset we are actively looking for.

Things You Get To Do:

• Own end-to-end architecture for the identity suite, ensuring scalability, modularity, and maintainability
• Drive technical planning, sprint scoping, and cross-functional alignment with product teams
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, foster engineering best practices
• Set and uphold standards for code quality, observability, and performance
• Collaborate with leadership on roadmap priorities, and help steer product evolution (e.g., direct indexing, advisory fee modelling)
• Contribute to a core system that millions of end users will rely on
• Help us create a global financial identity verification and risk management service
• Implement backend services and work on designing an architecture where reliability matters
• Take ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutions
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with 4+ years in a lead role
• Proven ability to design and scale complex distributed systems, preferably in Go
• Experience with managing and maintaining large and complex code bases
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience managing and mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional projects
• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset
• A preference for simple and elegant solutions
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
• Extensive knowledge relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
• Proven experience in building and maintaining microservices
• Ability to write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code
• Ability to turn business requirements into a flexible implementation model
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes

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

• Experience in the finance industry
• Experience with financial identity management, e.g. KYC
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Experience integrating with external services
• Experience working remotely
• Experience working at a startup
• DevOps mindset

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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