Team Lead - Trading

About the role

Alpaca is looking for a hands‑on Team Lead to own the design, architecture, and delivery of its algorithmic trading platform. You will stay close to the code while guiding a small engineering team to ship high‑performance, reliable trading services.

Key responsibilities

• Define technical direction and architecture for trading services, balancing trade‑offs and long‑term impact.
• Translate ambiguous business goals into a clear roadmap, break down work, and ensure predictable delivery.
• Lead day‑to‑day execution: sprint planning, unblocking engineers, and keeping stakeholders informed.
• Maintain code and design quality through reviews, design docs, and personal contributions.
• Own production reliability, latency targets, on‑call health, and incident follow‑through.
• Hire, onboard, mentor, and grow a small team of engineers.
• Collaborate with product, operations, compliance, clearing, and other engineering teams.

Required profile

• Senior or staff‑level software engineer with proven experience leading engineers.
• Track record of delivering complex, low‑latency, high‑throughput systems on schedule.
• Strong mentoring skills: providing feedback, career guidance, and raising team performance.
• Comfort operating in an ambiguous, fast‑moving startup environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including with non‑technical stakeholders.

Required skills

• C / C++
• Go
• Zig
• Rust
• Java
• Scala
• Python
• Low‑latency and high‑throughput optimization
• Messaging queues and brokers
• Distributed systems design, scalability, high availability
• Database design and concurrency control
• Order Management System (OMS) implementation
• Risk Management System (RMS) implementation

What we offer

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Health benefits
• One‑time $500 home‑office setup stipend
• Monthly $150 stipend via Brex card