Team Lead for Ledger

As a Team Lead, you will be responsible for leading a talented group of software engineers in designing, implementing, maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users that are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The Ledger Team is responsible for building a modern ledger system, whose purpose is to maintain a complete and correct view of everything that has ever happened in every account. From a business perspective, our ledger is the backbone of our financial record-keeping capabilities, providing a structured and organized system for recording and aggregating transactional data. It plays a crucial role in supporting financial reporting, decision-making, and compliance. From an engineering perspective, our ledger serves as the source of truth for many services in the Alpaca ecosystem.

For this role, we are seeking an experienced engineer who is obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, has proven experience architecting and building at scale, and who 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 participating in defining those goals in cooperation with a cross-functional team. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices are also great assets we actively look for.

Things You Get To Do:

• Lead and mentor a team of software engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment.
• Provide technical guidance and support, ensuring the team's adherence to best practices and development standards
• Lead by example in a hand-on way, by participating in the development and maintenance of the ledger system
• Define, implement, and monitor metrics to judge the health of the ledger
• Collaborate with stakeholders, including finance, operations, and product teams, to understand and define requirements
• Design and implement backend solutions where reliability and integrity matter
• Communicate project statuses, challenges, and solutions effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Collaborating with other engineering teams to improve the efficiency, scalability, and stability of Alpaca’s system as a whole
• Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Obsession with performant, defect-free, maintainable code
• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• The ability to work independently and as part of a team
• A preference for simple and elegant solutions
• At least 5 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Proven experience in building and maintaining microservices
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Experience with domain driven design and event driven design
• Ability to debug issues or better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
• Experience with IDLs such as protobuf or flatbuffer (we use both)
• Experience with RPC frameworks (we use gRPC)
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Extensive experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with double entry accounting

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):  

• Experience in the financial services or accounting industry
• Experience with ledger/book-of-record systems
• Experience with trading systems or brokerage middle-office/back-office
• Experience with distributed systems and distributed databases
• Experience with event driven systems and messaging brokers (we use Redpanda)
• Experience working remotely
• Experience working at a startup