Alpaca

Alpaca is an API infrastructure and licensed financial services company that allows developers and businesses to offer stock and crypto investing to their end-customers. We work with more than 100 companies across the globe to enable their investing products, and our mission is to provide financial services to everyone on the planet.

Alpaca’s globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage business specialists and backed by a group of well-capitalized investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Y Combinator as well as highly experienced industry angel investors and founders. We are also very tech-enthusiastic with notable track records in open source and startup communities.

TECH STACK

Go, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, React, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis

ENGINEERING TEAM AND PROCESSES

Our engineering team process is somewhere between scrum and kanban. We do daily standup every morning and manage project progress with JIRA. All the code reviews are done in GitHub and release process is seamlessly built around Google Cloud Build, Google Container Registry, GKE, etc. Everyone is encouraged to review others code and have transparent access to any information to improve products from any aspect.

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

We have built MarketStore (https://github.com/alpacahq/marketstore) in Go from scratch that is time-series database designed for financial data and made it open source. The challenge in our trading system is that you need to deal with real-time market environment to minimize latency while you need to make sure things work correctly as money management system. The requirements and system architecture are totally different and unique which is very exciting to tackle.