Clearing Operations Associate - Reconciliations and Generalist

Your Role:

Our Clearing Operations team at Alpaca is seeking a Reconciliations Specialist to lead the end-to-end process of reconciling the firm’s back office accounts—including suspense, wash, bank, custodian and other proprietary accounts. In this role, you will be responsible for preparing, reviewing, resolving exceptions, and ensuring timely follow-up across all reconciliation activities. You’ll work extensively in Excel or Google Sheets to verify that the firm’s books and records are accurate, complete, and in balance at all times.

Things You Get To Do:

• Own daily, weekly, and monthly reconciliations across suspense, wash, bank, and proprietary accounts.
• Investigate and resolve breaks with urgency and accuracy, collaborating across internal teams and external partners.
• Reconcile firm books and records against clearing systems, custodian records,  bank feeds, and external files to ensure zero-dollar variances.
• Drive the cleanup and aging analysis of historical reconciliation items, ensuring root-cause resolution and documentation.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to improve reconciliation tools, reporting, and workflow automation.
• Maintain and enhance reconciliation policies, procedures, and controls as the business scales.
• Support audit, regulatory, and operational due diligence requests related to firm balances and reconciliation controls.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• 2–5 years of experience in financial operations, preferably in a broker-dealer, clearing firm, or fintech environment.
• Deep understanding of reconciliation processes, with hands-on experience in bank, custodian, suspense, and internal accounts.
• Expert-level Excel or Google Sheets skills, including pivots, lookups, and complex formulas.
• Strong SQL background with ability to inner/left/right join tables to build SQL based reconciliations with unique tables.
• Strong attention to detail and a relentless focus on getting to zero breaks.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and solving problems proactively.
• Clear communicator with the ability to summarize findings for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Able to prioritize and own multiple deliverables in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Possess a FINRA SIE or within first 180 days of employment
• Must be able to follow company tenets of:
• Stay Curious
• Have Empathy
• Be Accountable

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

• FINRA Series 7
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Finance, Data Analytics, or a related field.
• Experience writing and optimizing SQL queries to support reconciliation and exception reporting.
• Expert with data visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Looker for tracking and presenting reconciliation metrics.
• Prior exposure to reconciliation or exception management tools (e.g., SmartStream TLM, Duco, FIS IntelliMatch).
• Knowledge of broker-dealer operations, clearing, or custody workflows.
• Experience working with APIs or flat-file data sources to automate reconciliation tasks.
• Comfort working in a startup or fast-paced fintech environment where priorities shift quickly.