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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- Fluent in business-level Japanese (including reading and writing)
- System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, 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).
Nice to haves
While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.
- 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.
