Senior Software Engineer

Remote - Tokyo, Japan or APAC

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

 

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 230+ 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:
As a part of the Global engineering team, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The Japan team is building a modern ledger system (Securities backend system) localized for Japan (but scalable to global). The purpose is to maintain a complete and correct view of everything that has ever happened in every account. From a business perspective, the ledger provides a structured and organized system for recording and aggregating transactional data. We will build them with modern architecture. In Japan, many securities companies still use old-fashioned and traditional ledger systems, but the day may come when the modern system we create will replace it. The next product will support NISA, API trading, and global stocks.

For this role, we seek an experienced engineer who is committed to delivering defect-free solutions, has proven experience architecting and building at scale, and is not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively defining those goals in cooperation with a cross-functional team.
 
Things You Get To Do:
  • It will basically be full remote work.
  • Collaborate with internal stakeholders–including finance, operations, and product teams–to deliver high-impact features/projects
  • Build backend systems/components with integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability in mind
  • Own the delivery of high-visibility features/projects, from design to deployment
  • Collaborate with global teams to improve the health of Alpaca’s systems
Who You Are (Must-Haves):
  • Fluent in business-level Japanese (including reading and writing) and conversational English (capable of using chat to communicate with global teams)
  • System design skills with object-oriented data modelling, service-oriented architectures, and system abstraction
  • Dedicated with performant, defect-free, maintainable code
  • A strong problem solver with a proactive mindset
  • A team player who can effectively coordinate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Comfortable working heads-down or tag-teaming problems
  • Strong coding skills around Go, Java
  • Ability to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
  • Experience with IDLs (e.g., protobuf), RPC frameworks (e.g., gRPC), cloud platforms (e.g., GCP), and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)
Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves): 
  • Experience in the financial services (preferably in Japan) or accounting industry
  • Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
  • Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
  • Experience with distributed systems/databases
  • Experience with event-driven systems
  • Experience working remotely
  • Experience working at a startup

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.

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