Senior Software Engineer
Alpaca, a global brokerage infrastructure company headquartered in California, is seeking a skilled backend engineer to join its Japan team. This is a fully remote, full-time opportunity to help build a modern securities ledger system tailored for the Japanese market, with plans to support NISA, API trading, and global stock access. You will work with international stakeholders to deliver high-impact financial infrastructure solutions using a modern tech stack. Alpaca offers a competitive salary, stock options, healthcare, a home-office stipend, and a monthly USD $150 allowance.
The ideal candidate is fluent in business-level Japanese and conversational English, experienced in Go or Java, and skilled in designing scalable backend systems. Proven expertise with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, PostgreSQL, and cloud platforms like GCP is essential. Familiarity with the financial services industry or distributed systems, and experience working in remote or startup environments, are valuable assets.
Alpaca’s mission is to open financial services to everyone on the planet. As part of a globally distributed team of over 200 professionals, you’ll collaborate with engineers and product teams from around the world in shaping the future of fintech.
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.
- 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
- 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)
- 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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