Team Lead - Trading
Leads a hands-on engineering team building and operating a high-performance algorithmic trading platform. The role combines architecture, coding, delivery ownership, production reliability, and people leadership, requiring senior/staff-level software engineering experience in trading or exchange systems.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead the team building Alpaca’s algorithmic trading platform.
- Set technical direction and architecture for team services, including long-term trade-offs.
- Own the roadmap and delivery by turning ambiguous business goals into scoped, sequenced engineering work.
- Plan sprints or cycles, unblock engineers, and maintain delivery visibility for stakeholders.
- Establish code and design quality through reviews, design documents, and hands-on contributions.
- Own production reliability, latency, correctness, on-call health, and incident follow-through.
- Hire, onboard, mentor, provide feedback to, and support the performance and career growth of engineers.
- Collaborate with product, operations, compliance, clearing, and other engineering teams.
Requirements
- Senior- or staff-level software engineering experience with formal or technical team leadership experience.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers.
- Track record delivering complex systems, including scoping, sequencing, and prioritization.
- Proficiency with low- and high-level languages such as C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, or Python.
- Experience optimizing for low latency and high throughput.
- Experience with messaging queues and message brokers.
- Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, concurrency control, and low-latency systems.
- System design experience with object-oriented data modeling and service-oriented architectures.
- Experience developing and implementing Order Management Systems (OMS) and Risk Management Systems (RMS).
- Previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems, such as OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, or quantitative trading.
- Clear written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Comfort working with ambiguity and limited process.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience hiring and building an engineering team from a small base.
- Experience owning a production trading or brokerage system as the accountable lead.
- Professional or personal algorithmic trading experience.
- FIX protocol knowledge.
- Observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking experience.
- Financial market knowledge, including exchanges, broker-dealers, and clearing.
- Experience with financial ledgers.
- Statistical and quantitative analysis skills.
- Experience with major cloud platforms, especially Google Cloud.
- Docker and Kubernetes experience.
- Experience working with distributed, remote-first teams across time zones.
Compensation and Benefits
- Competitive salary and stock options.
- Health benefits.
- One-time USD $500 new-hire home-office setup benefit.
- USD $150 monthly stipend via a Brex Card.
Skills
C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python, Distributed Systems, Databases, Concurrency Control, Message Brokers, Fix Protocol, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes
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