Director of Engineering, Trading

Alpaca

Director of Engineering responsible for leading the development of Alpaca's institutional trading platform. Focusing on high-performance trading architecture and team leadership across asset classes.

Posted 5/29/2026full-timeRemote • California, New York • 🇺🇸 United StatesLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed Systems

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Define and own and execute the engineering roadmap for Alpaca’s institutional trading platform
Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of engineers with a strong culture of ownership and execution
Partner with the Office of the CTO and Global Head of Brokerage to align engineering priorities with institutional and prime brokerage strategy
Lead the evolution toward a multi-asset trading architecture supporting cross-margining across equities, options, FX, futures, and other derivatives
Design and deliver institutional trading capabilities, including but not limited to:
Drive architectural decisions across trading APIs, our proprietary order management system, real-time risk, and margin engines
Set and enforce technical standards for performance, availability, scalability, and operational resilience in latency-sensitive systems
Coordinate multiple concurrent initiatives across trading, risk, margin, asset classes, and customer-facing tooling
Work cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, Operations, and Finance to deliver production-ready systems
Represent institutional trading engineering in executive-level planning and decision-making
Provide technical and architectural thought leadership in trading and brokerage technology, influencing direction internally and through industry engagement
Hands-on engineering, such as writing PoC code, conducting code reviews, deploying to production, and providing an L3 escalation contact point.

Requirements

What you’ll need

A Director-level (or above) engineering leader with experience owning critical, market-facing platforms
Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams focused on complex, high-impact systems
Deep understanding of institutional trading and brokerage technology, including execution systems, risk and margin platforms, and trading analytics
Experience designing or operating systems that support cross-asset risk and margining across multiple asset classes
Strong architectural judgment and the ability to balance speed, reliability, and control in regulated environments
Deep knowledge of OS fundamentals and distributed systems, sufficient to set architectural direction and evaluate designs for performance-critical trading systems.
Effective partner to senior business, brokerage, and product leaders
Clear communicator with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

trading APIsorder management systemreal-time riskmargin enginesarchitectural designperformance optimizationscalabilityoperational resiliencedistributed systemscross-asset risk

Soft Skills

leadershipteam buildingcommunicationcollaborationarchitectural judgmentstrategic planninginfluencingproblem-solvingstakeholder engagementexecution