Staff Software Engineer - New Markets Japan (JLPT N1 Fluent)

Your Role:

As a Senior Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form Alpaca’s foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets. You will contribute to regional recruitment initiatives, help drive cross-functional team projects, mentor teammates with respect to our engineering principles and practices, and foster Alpaca culture in the Japan region. We expect you to participate in operational reliability engineering during regional business hours, helping to ensure proactive 24×7 stability of our platform. For this role, we are seeking an experienced backend engineer who is dedicated to delivering seamless and high-quality software solutions.

Things You Get To Do:

• Design highly scalable, mission‑critical brokerage systems for the Japan market.
• Develop and enhance the middle‑ and back‑office systems, including gRPC microservices, REST and gRPC APIs, and third‑party vendor integrations specific to the Japan market (e.g., JPX, JSCC, JASDEC, banks, identity verification vendors).
• Work closely with Alpaca’s core teams to enhance and transform the core framework, enabling support for multiple languages, currencies, and markets, with a particular focus on Japan‑specific requirements such as NISA, MyNumber, withholding tax, and JP‑GAAP accounting.
• Collaborate with tech leads in other regions both synchronously and asynchronously, primarily through Slack and meetings, to align with global teams.
• Coordinate in Japanese with local regulators, vendors, partners, and business stakeholders, and translate those requirements into technical specifications for the global engineering team.
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs to maintain system integrity and performance.
• Participate in on‑call rotations and assist with timely engineering projects and production issues during Japan business hours.
• Thrive in a global environment, effectively navigating regulatory requirements and building scalable solutions to support Alpaca’s expansion in Japan.

Who You Are (Must‑Haves):

• Native or JLPT N1 level fluency in Japanese, with the ability to read, write, and communicate professionally with local regulators, vendors, and partners.
• Business‑level English fluency, with the ability to collaborate effectively in English‑only team meetings, design discussions, code reviews, and written documentation.
• Proven experience in designing and developing complex financial systems, preferably including double‑entry accounting.
• Strong understanding of accounting principles, ledger structures, and transaction reconciliation.
• Experience in building scalable, high‑availability financial applications that handle mu