Director of Engineering
Alpaca
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Canada
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Job Level
Tech Stack
About the role
- Build and lead a world-class engineering organization in Canada from the ground up, establishing hiring standards, engineering culture, and technical practices across multiple divisions
- Exhibit visionary leadership by shaping the overall direction of engineering teams, encouraging exploration of breakthrough ideas and technologies
- Understand and advocate for the needs of both the engineering team and end users, ensuring that technical decisions serve both engineering excellence and user outcomes
- Serve as the primary technical mentor and advisor, providing strategic guidance across teams and deeply engaging in long-term planning.
- Establish engineering best practices, code review standards, and technical decision-making frameworks tailored to the Canadian market context
- Foster Alpaca culture in the region while adapting practices to local market dynamics and regulatory requirements
- Lead regional recruitment initiatives, identifying top talent and building a diverse, high-performing engineering organization
- Ensure that responsibilities are clearly defined across the organization, establishing accountability frameworks for large-scale initiatives
- Drive innovation at a strategic level, encouraging teams to explore breakthrough ideas and technologies that transform our Canada operations
- Influence the strategic direction and culture of the engineering function, shaping not just projects but overall functional strategy
- Engage with senior leadership to ensure functional initiatives align with broader business objectives and market opportunities
- Evaluate and oversee complex technical projects across multiple divisions, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practices
- Balance high-level strategic planning with operational oversight necessary for execution, ensuring large-scale initiatives are executed with excellence
- Act as a key liaison between engineering teams and executive leadership, facilitating communication and alignment on strategic technical decisions
- Design and architect mission-critical financial systems for the Canadian market, including Canadian Ledger, regulatory reporting, multi-currency transaction processing, and compliance systems.
Requirements
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of architecting and building complex, large-scale financial systems in production
- Recognized as an industry authority with a strong record of solving high-impact technical challenges at scale
- Deep technical expertise combined with strategic vision, capable of guiding transformational technical initiatives across multiple divisions
- Experience evaluating and overseeing complex technical projects, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practices
- Deep expertise in Go or similar backend languages, with exceptional ability to design robust, efficient, and scalable system architectures
- Proven experience in designing and developing complex financial systems, including double-entry accounting, ledger structures, and transaction reconciliation
- Strong understanding of accounting principles, financial transaction processing, and regulatory compliance requirements in financial markets
- Experience building scalable, high-availability financial applications that handle multi-currency transactions and complex regulatory reporting
- Exceptional system design skills with the ability to make architectural decisions and trade-offs that balance technical excellence with business objectives
- Proven experience designing and implementing event-driven architectures for large-scale distributed systems
- Experience with message queues, pub/sub systems, and asynchronous processing patterns for building scalable, decoupled systems
- Strong computer science fundamentals and proven software engineering architecture experience
- Ability to balance a high-level technical overview with an understanding of day-to-day engineering challenges.
Benefits
- 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
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard skills
Gobackend languagessystem architecturefinancial systems designdouble-entry accountingledger structurestransaction reconciliationevent-driven architecturesmessage queuesasynchronous processing
Soft skills
leadershipstrategic visionmentorshipcommunicationinnovationaccountabilitycollaborationproblem-solvingadaptabilityinfluence