---
title: 'Director of Data Platform at Alpaca'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-data-platform-alpaca-north-te75rst6h6n9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Director of Data Platform at Alpaca 

- **Company:** Alpaca 
- **Location:** North, United States / Europe / United Kingdom
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-03-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/alpaca/jobs/5833647004

## 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 are looking for a Head of Data Platform to lead Alpaca’s growing Platform Engineering team. You will own the data strategy, the team’s execution, and the department’s roadmap.

The Data department serves every function at Alpaca: it powers partner invoicing and revenue attribution, provides the analytical foundation for sales, product, and compliance, and operates the data platform that processes hundreds of millions of events daily. You will manage three team leads, balancing operational delivery (invoicing, embedded analytics, regulatory reporting) with strategic bets (self-service warehouse, AI-powered analytics, enterprise search).

This is a player-coach role. You will set direction for the team while staying close enough to the technical details to make architecture decisions, unblock your leads, and represent data’s capabilities to the executive team.

Things You Get To Do:

- Lead and develop Platform Engineering & ETL
- Manage leads, set priorities, and ensure delivery.
- Own the Data Lakehouse architecture: Trino, Iceberg/GCS, Airflow, Airbyte, Redpanda CDC, dbt.
- Make build-vs-buy decisions on tooling.
- Drive partner invoicing accuracy and evolution: ensure invoicing logic is versioned, reproducible, and scales with new pricing mechanisms and product launches.
- Deliver embedded analytics: expose warehouse data to partners via BrokerDash, SSR pipelines, and API-based reporting. Own row-level security and entitlements.
- Support product launches with data change management: coordinate data impact analysis for new products (fixed income, global stocks, perps, 24/5 trading) across downstream datasets, dashboards, and reverse ETL.
- Accelerate self-service: move the organization toward self-serve analytics via semantic layers, data catalogues, and conversational BI so the data team can shift from ad-hoc queries to strategic projects.
- Guide AI/ML enablement: oversee enterprise AI search, agent-based workflow automation, and LLM-powered analytics. Help balance vendor solutions with in-house development.
- Collaborate with Finance, Sales, Product, Compliance, and Customer Success to translate business needs into data products.
- Manage infrastructure costs: keep data + cloud cost ratio under target as AUC grows.
- Operate production systems: own on-call processes, incident response, and SLOs for data freshness, accuracy, and availability.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

- 8+ years in data engineering, including 3+ years managing data teams (leads + ICs).
- Deep experience with modern data stack: dbt, Trino/Presto or equivalent query engines, Apache Iceberg or similar table formats, cloud object storage.
- Hands-on experience with ETL/ELT patterns at scale: CDC (Debezium/Kafka), batch (Airflow/dbt), streaming, and reverse ETL.
- Track record of building self-service analytics capabilities for non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience with financial data: trading, invoicing, revenue attribution, or regulatory reporting in fintech or financial services.
- Proficiency in Python and SQL. Comfortable reading code, reviewing PRs, and making architecture decisions.
- Experience managing distributed/remote teams across multiple time zones.
- Strong stakeholder management: you can translate between executive priorities and engineering execution.
- Experience with GCP (GKE, GCS, BigQuery migration), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform.

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

- Experience with brokerage or broker-dealer operations (clearing, settlement, market making, reconciliation).
- Familiarity with LLM/AI tooling: MCP, vector databases, enterprise search, conversational BI (WrenAI, Cube).
- Background in compliance analytics (AML/Actimize, KYC, margin calls).
- Exposure to open-source data catalogues (OpenMetadata, Collate) and data quality frameworks.

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.

[Recruitment Privacy Policy](https://files.alpaca.markets/disclosures/AlpacaRecruitmentPrivacyPolicy.pdf)

## About Alpaca 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Alpaca provides developer-first APIs and brokerage infrastructure that enable fintechs, institutions, and individual developers to build and scale investing and trading applications across stocks, options, and crypto.
- **Entity Type**: Private (backed by $320M in total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Silicon Valley, California, USA (globally distributed remote company)
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Yoshi Yokokawa (CEO) and Hitoshi Harada (CPO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Financial Technology (Fintech), Brokerage Infrastructure, API Services
- **Target customers**: B2B (fintechs, global financial institutions, broker-dealers, registered investment advisors) and B2C (algo traders, quant funds, retail investors, developers)
- **Mission statement**: "Open financial services to everyone on the planet" — allowing 8+ billion people to access financial markets.

## Products & Services
- **Broker API**: Full-stack, end-to-end brokerage infrastructure service that empowers global fintechs and institutions to build customizable investing applications and platforms. Includes clearing, custody, compliance, and regulatory setups.
- **Trading API**: Allows programmatic traders, retail investors, hedge funds, and prop firms to develop algorithms that automate trading strategies across stocks, options, and crypto. Features REST/FIX integration, real-time market data, and 1.5ms order processing via OMS v2.
- **Tokenization Network**: Enables tokenized equities to trade as one connected market with instant in-kind mint/redeem, deep liquidity, and 24/7 API access.
- **High Yield Cash**: Competitive APY on uninvested USD cash with up to $2.5M in FDIC sweep coverage.
- **Fully Paid Securities Lending**: Enables clients to lend securities for additional yield.
- **24/5 Trading**: Always-on trading with automatic session-aware order routing and real-time overnight data.
- **Self-Clearing Operations**: Full self-clearing broker-dealer (member of DTCC, FICC, OCC, Nasdaq Exchange) providing reduced costs for partners.
- **Paper Trading & Backtesting**: API sandbox environment and backtesting with historical market data.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $320 million from top-tier investors
- **Notable Investors**: Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Eldridge, Y Combinator, and angel investors including Joshua S. Levine (former CTO/COO of ETRADE), Nate Rodland (former COO of Robinhood), Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Jacqueline Reses, Asiff Hirjii (former President/COO of Coinbase), Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), and founders of Plaid and Wealthsimple.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Over 7 million brokerage accounts opened across 40+ countries
  - 61,000+ monthly active developers (MAD)
  - 250+ employees in 25 countries
  - Self-clearing since 2024; member of DTCC, FICC, OCC, and Nasdaq Exchange (2025)
  - ISO 27001:2022 certified, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, EU US DPF, CSA Level 1, ICO compliant
  - Excess SIPC coverage up to $30M in securities and $1M in cash per customer

## Competitive Advantages
- **Developer-first approach**: Easy-to-use APIs with SDKs in Python, .NET/C#, Go, Node, and more; 99.99% system uptime as of January 2026.
- **Full-stack regulatory infrastructure**: FINRA-registered broker-dealer, self-clearing, SIPC member with excess coverage, and multiple international regulatory licenses (Bahamas, Japan, FinCEN MSB).
- **Multi-asset support**: Stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, tokenized equities — all via a single API.
- **Global reach**: Powers financial institutions across 40+ countries including Australia, Chile, Denmark, France, Mexico, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, and more.
- **Proprietary technology**: Builds its own technology stack rather than relying on legacy vendors (e.g., open-source MarketStore database for financial time-series data).

## Strategic Focus
- **Global expansion**: Actively working on new product offerings such as global stocks and index options.
- **Deepening regulatory moat**: Continued investment in self-clearing capabilities and international licensing to serve partners worldwide.
- **Tokenization & digital assets**: Expanding the Instant Tokenization Network and digital asset offerings for 24/7 liquidity.
- **Embedded finance**: Helping fintechs and institutions embed investing features directly into their own platforms.
- **Scaling the developer community**: Growing the 61,000+ monthly active developer base through open-source contributions, community platforms, and educational resources.

## Why Work Here
- **100% remote-first**: Globally distributed team across 20+ countries and almost every time zone; no central office requirement.
- **Global, multicultural team**: "Melting pot of diverse backgrounds" from tech startups to deep financial experience; team members in 25 countries.
- **Culture**: Goal-oriented, radical honesty, empathy-driven, and focused on solving hard problems. Described as "ambitiously creative" with a "last 10% of effort" mentality.
- **Career growth**: Fast-scaling startup with "limitless opportunities" for those looking to challenge themselves and advance.
- **Impact**: Directly shaping the future of finance by disrupting a legacy industry; building infrastructure that enables millions of people to access financial markets.
- **Leadership**: Founded by Yoshi Yokokawa (former Lehman Brothers, Endeavor Entrepreneur) and Hitoshi Harada (former Lead Architect at Greenplum/EMC, PostgreSQL contributor); executive team from Robinhood, Strike, TD Securities, TMX Group.
- **Notable perks**: Competitive compensation, equity, and the chance to work on open-source projects (e.g., MarketStore).

## Sources
1. [alpaca.markets - About Us](https://alpaca.markets/about-us)
2. [alpaca.markets - Homepage](https://alpaca.markets/)
3. [alpaca.markets - Careers/Hiring](https://alpaca.markets/hiring)
4. [LinkedIn - Alpaca](https://www.linkedin.com/company/alpacamarkets)
5. [docs.alpaca.markets - About Alpaca](https://docs.alpaca.markets/us/docs/about-alpaca)

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