Engineering Manager - Hands-On

Your Role:

We're seeking an Engineering Manager for Canada to establish Alpaca's engineering presence in the Canadian market from the ground up. In the near term you will be very hands-on: architecting and building critical financial infrastructure yourself, hiring the first few engineers, and shaping the technical strategy for one of North America's largest and most sophisticated financial markets.

You will be the strategic technical leader for Canada operations. For the near term this is not a pure engineering management role: you will work with a small founding team, spend most of your time designing and writing production code, and stay close enough to the day-to-day work to make sound architectural calls. You will act as the key liaison between engineering and executive leadership, and work directly with finance, operations, product, legal, compliance, partners, and regulators (CIRO).

What you build here becomes the foundation for launching in Canada and for scaling to similar international markets. Success is measured by a working, compliant Canadian brokerage platform that partners can launch on, and an engineering organization that can run and grow it.

Location: Remote within Canada. Collaboration with APAC, Americas, and EMEA teams will occasionally require meetings outside regular working hours.

What You'll Walk Into

You won't be starting from a blank page. You'll own a defined build:

• An emerging Canadian brokerage solution: an MVP for localized infrastructure and a Canadian Ledger instance, account creation and KYC, funding and foreign exchange (CAD), settlement, corporate actions, compliance and regulatory reporting, trading, and reporting.
• A highly regulated environment: CIRO requirements, data residency, and disaster recovery and business continuity expectations shape architecture from day one.
• A global core platform: you'll work with Alpaca's core teams to extend the shared framework for Canadian markets, currencies, and regulatory requirements, rather than forking it.
• Partners waiting to launch: the platform must scale across multiple Canadian fintech partners, not just the first one.
• A small founding team to build: a few engineers to start. Hiring standards, engineering culture, and practices for Canada are yours to establish, and you will write code with them.

Things You Get To Do

Team building & leadership

• Hire and lead Canada's founding engineering team: standards, culture, and technical practices. In the near term you work alongside a few engineers, in the code, rather than running several teams.
• Lead regional recruitment and build a diverse, high-performing team.
• Establish engineering best practices, code review standards, and technical decision-making frameworks suited to the Canadian market context.
• Foster Alpaca culture in the region while adapting practices to local market dynamics and regulatory requirements.
• Mentor those engineers directly and define clear ownership for the work you are building together.

Strategic technical leadership

• Set the technical strategy for Canada operations and align it with broader business objectives alongside senior leadership.
• Take complex technical projects through design and production yourself, holding the bar for scalability, reliability, and industry best practices.
• Introduce new ideas and technologies in the systems you are building, and bring the founding team along as it grows.
• Contribute to company-wide policies and help establish Alpaca as a technical leader in the Canadian fintech ecosystem.

Technical architecture & implementation

• Design and build mission-critical financial systems for Canada yourself, including the Canadian Ledger, multi-currency transaction processing, regulatory reporting, and compliance systems.
• Write and ship the backend services where reliability, scalability, and regulatory compliance are paramount, and review the code the team produces.
• Own the key Canadian brokerage capabilities: localized infrastructure and ledger, account creation and KYC, funding and FX, settlement, corporate actions, compliance and regulatory reporting, trading, and reporting.
• Drive decisions on cloud infrastructure, data residency, security, and observability, and establish infrastructure patterns for Canadian deployments that meet CIRO requirements.

Business, partner & regulatory engagement

• Work with finance, operations, product, legal, and compliance to translate complex business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Engage with regulators (CIRO), vendors, and partner operations teams so systems comply with Canadian market regulations.
• Work closely with partners on requirements, technical integration, and successful launch.
• Communicate status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including C-level executives.
• Contribute technical insight to strategic planning and market-expansion decisions.

Operational excellence

• Own operational reliability for Canada and serve as incident commander during regional business hours, with proactive 24x7 stability.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices tailored to Canadian operations and regulatory requirements.
• Establish disaster recovery and business continuity practices that meet CIRO requirements.
• Lead troubleshooting of critical incidents and participate in on-call rotations.
• Manage infrastructure and service vendors, including provisioning, upgrades, and incident resolution.

Global collaboration

• Collaborate with tech leads in APAC, Americas, and EMEA, synchronously and asynchronously.
• Lead cross-functional, cross-region projects and influence architecture across the organization while addressing Canada-specific requirements.
• Set clear ownership boundaries and async-first practices to reduce cross-time-zone dependencies.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of architecting and building complex, large-scale financial systems in production, and recent hands-on coding rather than a long stretch away from the codebase.
• Proven experience as a hands-on engineering lead: shipping production systems while hiring and leading engineers, and acting as the liaison between engineering and executive leadership.
• Deep expertise in Go or a similar backend language, with exceptional system design skills and sound judgement on architectural trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with financial systems: double-entry accounting, ledger structures, transaction reconciliation, and multi-currency processing.
• Experience designing event-driven architectures for large-scale distributed systems, including message queues, pub/sub, and asynchronous processing.
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure), Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible), GitOps, and observability and incident management.
• Familiarity with financial-markets regulatory compliance, ideally Canadian or North American, including data residency requirements for financial services.
• Understanding of brokerage operations: account management, KYC, trade settlement, corporate actions, FX, and regulatory reporting.
• Experience engaging regulators, partners, and senior stakeholders, and explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences, including executives and board members.
• Ability to act as incident commander and deliver complex projects on tight timelines without compromising quality or compliance.
• Experience in a startup or fast-growing technology company, preferably in fintech or financial services.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience in the Canadian financial services sector or a CIRO-regulated environment.
• Experience building teams in Canada or other North American markets.
• Familiarity with the Canadian fintech ecosystem, market dynamics, and competitive landscape.
• Experience with partner integrations and B2B2C financial services platforms.
• Experience launching new markets or products in regulated financial environments.
• Experience managing vendors, organizational budgeting, and resource allocation.
• Experience working with global teams across multiple time zones.
• Passion for financial markets, algorithmic trading, or brokerage operations.
• Cloud or infrastructure certifications (GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform).