---
title: 'Senior Business Architect at Alpaca'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-business-architect-alpaca-canada-americas-a2bd3mrh146g'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-12'
---

# Senior Business Architect at Alpaca 

- **Company:** Alpaca 
- **Location:** Canada / Americas
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-11-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-12
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/alpaca/jobs/6250954004

## 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're seeking a Senior Business Architect (Canada) for ACCC: someone who can go deep on brokerage operations across accounts, trading, clearing, settlement, custody, and asset servicing, and can turn that operating knowledge into clear requirements and turn that into clear requirements Product and Engineering can build.

You are the bridge between how the Canadian brokerage actually works and the product roadmap. You lead structured discovery with counterparts and work out how partner firms, account opening, clearing, custody, and day-to-day operations fit together, then write that down as epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, and open decisions.

Success is measured by: requirements and designs teams can build without guessing; a clear split between what the system does and what people still do at launch; solution options that Product and Engineering can sequence; and a backlog tied to ACCC milestones and capabilities.

## What You'll Walk Into

You won't be starting from zero. You'll be owning live problems:

- Operations scope: defining what ACCC must support across accounts, trading, clearing, settlement, custody, books and records, and asset servicing.
- Partner firm handoffs: what partners send us, what we send back, and who does what across accounts, trades, cash, and securities.
- Account and trade lifecycle: account opening, settlement in Canada through CDS, failed trades, transfers, and corporate actions such as dividends and splits.
- Platform gap analysis: comparing today's Alpaca platform with Canadian brokerage operations requirements to decide what we reuse, change, or build.
- Launch scope: separating what must work on day one from what follows, including registered accounts (TFSA, RRSP, RESP), more products, and more partner services.
- Open decisions: logging each one with an owner so it gets closed or consciously deferred.

## What you’ll own

Requirements across ACCC’s brokerage operations, and what comes next:

- Map brokerage operations end to end across these areas: broker onboarding, account carrying, trade clearing/settlement, custody of cash/securities, books & records, financing (if in scope), corporate actions, transfers, exceptions, and reporting
- Help define target operating models and capability designs: what the platform must do, what stays manual (for now), what is control vs. feature, what is Canada-specific vs. reusable globally
- Turn regulatory and operational obligations into product requirements: what the platform must do, what stays manual (for now), what is control vs. feature, what is Canada-specific vs. reusable globally
- Write epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and edge cases that Product and Engineering can build against.
- Produce the artifacts teams actually use: process maps, capability matrices, requirement specs, data/field definitions, state machines, exception catalogs, RACI for build vs. run, and decision logs
- Work with Product Managers and Engineering to sequence MVP → launch → scale: must-haves for go-live vs. post-launch backlog across these operating areas (e.g. additional account types, asset classes, IB services, automation)
- Interface across Product, Engineering, Ops, and Compliance: translate business need into buildable scope; escalate open decisions with clear owners and options
- Run structured discovery: workshops, SME interviews, gap analysis vs. current Alpaca platform, peer operating models where useful
- Keep requirements automation- and AI-aware: flag where STP, rules, and AI-assisted exception handling should be designed in—not bolted on later
- Flag where straight-through processing, rules, and AI-assisted exception handling should be designed from the start.
- Maintain a living requirements backlog tied to ACCC milestones, risks, and open decisions

## Who you are (Must-Haves)

- Excited about what Alpaca is building and about standing up Canadian brokerage operations.
- Comfortable operating as a senior IC reporting to the President — driving clarity across Product, Engineering, Ops, and Compliance without needing a formal team.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, finance, or equivalent.
- 8+ years as a business architect, business analyst, consultant or in product operations within brokerage, clearing, custody, or capital markets.
- Comfortable translating brokerage operating processes and regulatory requirements into product language (you don’t need to be a lawyer or CCO)
- Strong structured analysis: flows, entities, states, exceptions, controls, and what breaks if a step is missing.
- Clear writing: specs, diagrams, and decisions others can execute against.
- Collaborative with Ops SMEs, PMs, Engineering, and Compliance; curious enough to dig; disciplined enough to close loops
- Bias to precision over vague “requirements fluff”; you know when something is a product change vs. an ops procedure vs. a policy decision
- Judgment to tell a product change from an operating procedure or a policy decision.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills across operations, product, engineering, and compliance.

Who you might be (Nice-to-Haves)

- Experience on a carrying, self-clearing, or custody build.
- Canadian dealer, carrying broker, or introducing broker experience.
- Prior business architecture or enterprise/solution architecture exposure in capital markets
- Familiarity with CDS or Canadian settlement workflows.
- Experience with registered accounts or Canadian tax requirements (TFSA, RRSP, RESP).
- Background with API or platform brokerage products.
- Experience working at a fintech, startup, or greenfield launch.
- AI-native workflow: recurring use of tools like Cursor, Claude, or ChatGPT in spec drafting, discovery synthesis, and gap analysis.
- Experience shaping greenfield capability roadmaps with executive sponsors

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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