Director of Engineering - Canada

Job Description

Job Description

Job Description:\n\n Who We Are: Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 9 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it. Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Our Team Members: We're a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.Your Role: As the Founding Director of Engineering for Canada, you will demonstrate visionary leadership by shaping the overall direction of multiple divisions and establishing Alpaca's engineering presence in the Canadian market from the ground up. This is a unique opportunity to build a world-class engineering organization, architect critical financial infrastructure, and shape the technical strategy for one of North America's largest and most sophisticated financial markets. You will serve as the strategic technical leader for Canada operations, balancing high-level strategic planning with the operational oversight necessary for execution. This role requires exceptional technical depth combined with strategic vision, capable of guiding transformational technical initiatives that span multiple divisions. You will serve as a key liaison between teams and executive leadership, facilitating communication and alignment while influencing the function's strategic direction and culture. You will engage with senior leadership to ensure functional initiatives align with broader business objectives, and evaluate and oversee complex technical projects to ensure scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practices. You will balance a high-level technical overview with an understanding of day-to-day engineering challenges, ensuring that large-scale initiatives are executed with excellence and that responsibilities are clearly defined across the organization. For this role, we are seeking an industry-recognized engineering leader who drives innovation at a strategic level and encourages teams to explore breakthrough ideas and technologies. You must understand and advocate for the needs of both the team and the end user, ensuring that technical decisions serve both engineering excellence and business outcomes. You will be responsible for building a talented engineering organization in Canada, establishing engineering culture and practices, and ensuring operational excellence in a highly regulated environment. You will lead the rapid development of a comprehensive Canadian brokerage solution, including localized infrastructure, ledger systems, account creation & KYC, funding & foreign exchange, settlement, corporate actions, compliance, trading, and reporting capabilities. What you build here will become the foundation for launching in the Canadian market and scaling across Canada and other similar international markets.Things You Get To Do:Team Building and LeadershipBuild and lead a world-class engineering organization in Canada from the ground up, establishing hiring standards, engineering culture, and technical practices across multiple divisionsExhibit visionary leadership by shaping the overall direction of engineering teams, encouraging exploration of breakthrough ideas and technologiesUnderstand and advocate for the needs of both the engineering team and end users, ensuring that technical decisions serve both engineering excellence and user outcomesServe as the primary technical mentor and advisor, providing strategic guidance across teams and deeply engaging in long-term planning.Establish engineering best practices, code review standards, and technical decision-making frameworks tailored to the Canadian market contextFoster Alpaca culture in the region while adapting practices to local market dynamics and regulatory requirementsLead regional recruitment initiatives, identifying top talent and building a diverse, high-performing engineering organizationEnsure that responsibilities are clearly defined across the organization, establishing accountability frameworks for large-scale initiativesStrategic Technical LeadershipDrive innovation at a strategic level, encouraging teams to explore breakthrough ideas and technologies that transform our Canada operationsInfluence the strategic direction and culture of the engineering function, shaping not just projects but overall functional strategyEngage with senior leadership to ensure functional initiatives align with broader business objectives and market opportunitiesEvaluate and oversee complex technical projects across multiple divisions, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practicesBalance high-level strategic planning with operational oversight necessary for execution, ensuring large-scale initiatives are executed with excellenceAct as a key liaison between engineering teams and executive leadership, facilitating communication and alignment on strategic technical decisionsPossess deep technical expertise combined with strategic vision, capable of guiding transformational technical initiatives that span multiple divisionsBalance a high-level technical overview with an understanding of day-to-day engineering challenges, ensuring architectural decisions are grounded in practical implementation experienceInfluence company-wide policies and contribute to industry best practices, establishing Alpaca as a technical leader in the Canadian fintech ecosystemBusiness Stakeholder EngagementCollaborate directly with business stakeholders, including finance, operations, product, legal, and compliance teams, understanding and advocating for both team needs and end user requirementsTranslate complex business requirements into robust technical solutions, balancing innovation with regulatory compliance and operational constraintsEngage with local regulators (CIRO), vendors, and partner operations teams to ensure the development of robust, scalable systems that comply with Canadian market regulationsWork closely with partners to understand requirements, align on technical integration, and ensure a successful launchCommunicate project statuses, technical challenges, and solutions effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including C-level executives and senior leadershipParticipate in strategic planning sessions, contributing technical insights that inform business strategy and market expansion decisionsAct as a key liaison between engineering teams and executive leadership, facilitating communication and alignment on strategic initiativesEnsure that large-scale initiatives are executed with excellence, with clearly defined responsibilities across the organizationTechnical Architecture and ImplementationDesign and architect mission-critical financial systems for the Canadian market, including Canadian Ledger, regulatory reporting, multi-currency transaction processing, and compliance systemsLead the design and implementation of backend solutions where reliability, scalability, and regulatory compliance are paramountWork closely with Alpaca's core teams to enhance and transform the core framework, enabling support for Canadian markets, currencies (CAD), and regulatory requirementsArchitect and implement key Canadian brokerage capabilities, including: Localized Infrastructure and Ledger (Canadian Ledger instance)Account Creation & KYC systemsFunding & Foreign Exchange (FX) processingSettlement systemsCorporate Actions processingCompliance and regulatory reportingTrading infrastructureReporting systemsDesign systems with scalability in mind, ensuring the solution built for our partners can scale across multiple Canadian fintech partnersDrive technical decisions around cloud infrastructure, data residency, security, and observability for Canada operationsEstablish infrastructure patterns and practices for Canadian deployments, ensuring compliance with CIRO regulations and data residency requirementsOperational ExcellenceEnsure operational reliability engineering and serve as incident commander during regional business hours, ensuring proactive 24x7 stabilityEstablish monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices tailored to Canada operations and regulatory requirementsTroubleshot critical incidents and reported bugs, leading resolution efforts with authority and technical depthParticipate in on-call rotations and ensure timely response to engineering projects and production issuesEstablish disaster recovery and business continuity practices that meet CIRO regulatory requirementsManage vendor relationships for infrastructure and services, ensuring vendors meet operational and regulatory requirementsCoordinate with vendors for infrastructure provisioning, maintenance, upgrades, and incident resolutionEnsure systems are designed for high availability and can handle the scale required for multiple Canadian fintech partnersCross-Functional CollaborationCollaborate with tech leads in other regions (APAC, Americas, EMEA) both synchronously and asynchronously, using Slack and occasional meetings outside of regular working hours to align with global teamsLead cross-functional projects that span multiple teams and regions, ensuring alignment and effective executionInfluence architectural decisions across the organization, contributing to global platform capabilities while addressing Canada-specific requirementsEstablish clear ownership boundaries and async-first practices to reduce synchronous dependencies across time zonesWork closely with product, compliance, and business teams to ensure technical solutions align with regulatory requirements and business objectivesWho You Are (Must-Haves):Technical Excellence12+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of architecting and building complex, large-scale financial systems in productionRecognized as an industry authority with a strong record of solving high-impact technical challenges at scaleDeep technical expertise combined with strategic vision, capable of guiding transformational technical initiatives across multiple divisionsExperience evaluating and overseeing complex technical projects, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practicesDeep expertise in Go or similar backend languages, with exceptional ability to design robust, efficient, and scalable system architecturesProven experience in designing and developing complex financial systems, including double-entry accounting, ledger structures, and transaction reconciliationStrong understanding of accounting principles, financial transaction processing, and regulatory compliance requirements in financial marketsExperience building scalable, high-availability financial applications that handle multi-currency transactions and complex regulatory reportingExceptional system design skills with the ability to make architectural decisions and trade-offs that balance technical excellence with business objectivesProven experience designing and implementing event-driven architectures for large-scale distributed systemsExperience with message queues, pub/sub systems, and asynchronous processing patterns for building scalable, decoupled systemsStrong computer science fundamentals and proven software engineering architecture experienceAbility to balance a high-level technical overview with an understanding of day-to-day engineering challengesLeadership and InfluenceProven experience exhibiting visionary leadership by shaping the overall direction of multiple divisions or engineering organizationsExceptional ability to balance high-level strategic planning with operational oversight necessary for executionDemonstrated experience acting as a key liaison between teams and executive leadership, facilitating communication and alignmentProven track record of influencing the strategic direction and culture of the engineering functionExperience engaging with senior leadership to ensure functional initiatives align with broader business objectivesPossesses deep technical expertise combined with strategic vision, capable of guiding transformational technical initiativesExperience evaluating and overseeing complex technical projects, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with industry best practicesAbility to balance a high-level technical overview with an understanding of day-to-day engineering challengesProven experience building and leading engineering organizations from the ground up, establishing culture, practices, and technical standards across multiple teamsStrong mentorship capabilities, with experience providing strategic mentorship across teams and contributing to long-term planningDemonstrated ability to drive innovation at a strategic level, encouraging teams to explore breakthrough ideas and technologiesProven experience understanding and advocating for the needs of both engineering teams and end usersTrack record of ensuring large-scale initiatives are executed with excellence, with clearly defined responsibilities across organizationsBusiness Acumen and Stakeholder ManagementStrategic thinking and the ability to translate technical concepts into business strategies and market opportunitiesProven experience collaborating with business stakeholders, including finance, operations, product, legal, and compliance teamsStrong communication skills to collaborate effectively with global teams, local regulators, vendors, and internal stakeholders at all levels, including senior leadershipAbility to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences, including C-level executives, board members, and business leadersExperience engaging with regulators and ensuring technical solutions