---
title: 'Team Lead - Trading at Alpaca'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/team-lead-trading-alpaca-americas-y6mmrzxf9rhx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Team Lead - Trading at Alpaca 

- **Company:** Alpaca 
- **Location:** Americas
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/alpaca/jobs/6162099004

## 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:

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

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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