Staff Frontend Engineer

About the Role

As a Staff Frontend Engineer, you are a technical leader and strategist for **Alpaca Markets’ frontend ecosystem. Your impact goes far beyond a single team or feature set — you help define how frontend engineering works at Alpaca today and how it should evolve over the next several years.

This role is not about being the “best React developer in the room.”
It’s about setting direction, simplifying complexity, and enabling many teams to move faster and safer.

You will work closely with product, backend, platform, and design partners to shape architecture, standards, and long-term technical strategy across Alpaca’s frontend surface area.

We’re looking for someone who brings deep frontend expertise, enjoys mentoring others, and thrives in a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement. You’ll collaborate in a highly cross-functional environment, building elegant and seamless user experiences with a strong focus on polish, performance, responsiveness, and accessibility.

What You’ll Do

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Act as a long-term technical steward for Alpaca’s frontend architecture (2–5 year horizon).
• Design and evolve scalable frontend patterns for data fetching, state management, performance, and runtime configuration.

• Drive large-scale initiatives such as:

  • Design system evolution and adoption

  • Frontend platform standardization
  • Performance, reliability, and developer-experience improvements
• Identify and reduce systemic frontend technical debt with measurable business impact.

Scope & Organizational Impact

• Lead cross-team, multi-quarter initiatives spanning multiple product areas.
• Define rollout strategies that enable change without blocking feature delivery (e.g. phased migrations, feature flags, compatibility layers).
• Partner with backend and platform teams to solve end-to-end system problems, not just frontend symptoms.

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Influence engineers and leaders across the broader engineering organization.
• Write RFCs, decision records, and architectural proposals that align teams and drive adoption.
• Mentor Senior Engineers and help raise the overall frontend engineering bar.
• Navigate conflicting opinions and help teams disagree and commit.

Navigate Ambiguity & Risk

• Take loosely defined business problems and turn them into clear, actionable technical initiatives.
• Manage risk in large migrations, architectural shifts, and platform-level changes.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term sustainability, even when ROI is not immediately visible.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Extensive experience building and scaling modern frontend applications (React + TypeScript or similar).
• Proven track record operating at Staff or equivalent level, with impact across multiple teams or domains.

• Strong understanding of frontend architecture at scale, including:

  • Data-fetching patterns

  • Performance optimization
  • Design systems
  • Runtime configuration
  • Observability and reliability
• Experience leading large technical initiatives from problem definition through adoption.
• 7+ years of professional experience in frontend development.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to translate product mockups and designs into fully realised user interfaces.

• Strong proficiency with:

  • TypeScript and React

  • HTML and CSS (e.g. TailwindCSS)
• Passion for creating intuitive, high-performance user interfaces.
• Experience working with REST APIs and WebSocket best practices.
• Track record of setting or influencing frontend best practices.
• Strong attention to detail and appreciation for design quality and aesthetics.

What Sets You Apart

• You think in terms of systems, leverage, and long-term outcomes, not just features.
• You’re comfortable influencing without authority.
• You can explain complex technical trade-offs to both engineers and non-engineers.
• You optimize for organizational effectiveness, not personal ownership.

Nice-to-Haves

• Financial services experince, trading, banking or Algorithmic trading experience (professional or personal).
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP).
• Experience or understanding of financial markets.
• Experience working in a startup or scale-up environment.
• Experience working in fully remote teams.