VP of Engineering, Institutional Trading

Your Role

Alpaca is building the next-generation market infrastructure for active and institutional traders. As VP of Engineering, Institutional Trading, you will lead the engineering strategy for expanding Alpaca’s industry-leading API-driven trading and brokerage platform into more sophisticated institutional use cases.

Reporting to the CTO, you will build and scale a focused engineering organization responsible for institutional trading capabilities across multiple asset classes. You will work closely with the Global Head of Brokerage and other senior leaders to evolve Alpaca’s platform toward a multi-asset, cross-margining offering spanning FX, futures, and other derivatives alongside existing equities and options.

This role is designed for a VP-level engineering leader who can extend a proven brokerage platform into a new institutional tier through strong architectural judgment, execution discipline, and team leadership.

Things You Get To Do

• Define and own the engineering roadmap for Alpaca’s institutional trading platform
• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of engineers with a strong culture of ownership and execution
• Partner with the CTO and Global Head of Brokerage to align engineering priorities with institutional and prime brokerage strategy
• Lead the evolution toward a multi-asset trading architecture supporting cross-margining across equities, options, FX, futures, and other derivatives
• Design and deliver institutional trading capabilities, including but not limited to:
• Drive architectural decisions across trading APIs, execution systems, real-time risk, margin engines, and analytics platforms
• Set and enforce technical standards for performance, availability, scalability, and operational resilience in latency-sensitive systems
• Coordinate multiple concurrent initiatives across trading, risk, margin, asset classes, and customer-facing tooling
• Work cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, Operations, and Finance to deliver production-ready systems
• Represent institutional trading engineering in executive-level planning and decision-making
• Provide technical and architectural thought leadership in trading and brokerage technology, influencing direction internally and through industry engagement
• Hands-on engineering, such as writing PoC code, conducting code reviews, deploying to production, and providing an L3 escalation contact point.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• A VP-level (or above) engineering leader with experience owning critical, market-facing platforms
• Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams focused on complex, high-impact sysems
• Deep understanding of institutional trading and brokerage technology, including execution systems, risk and margin platforms, and trading analytics
• Experience designing or operating systems that support cross-asset risk and margining across multiple asset classes
• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to balance speed, reliability, and control in regulated environments
• Deep knowledge of OS fundamentals and distributed systems, sufficient to set architectural direction and evaluate designs for performance-critical trading systems.
• Effective partner to senior business, brokerage, and product leaders
• Clear communicator with technical and non-technical stakeholders

 Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):  

• Experience with algorithmic trading systems across multiple asset classes
• Exposure to portfolio margin or cross-margining methodologies
• Background supporting hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, or other institutional clients
• Experience contributing to architecture standards or externally visible technical initiatives
• Prior experience scaling trading platforms during periods of rapid growth