Infrastructure Engineer / Linux Performance Engineer

About the job

We're looking for an Infrastructure Engineer who thrives on squeezing every microsecond out of a system. You'll own the performance, reliability, and automation of our bare-metal trading infrastructure in an environment where latency is measured in nanoseconds, and every kernel tuning decision matters. If you're the kind of engineer who reads kernel changelogs for fun and has opinions about NIC ring buffer sizes, we'd love to talk!

Job Description:

• Own and optimize our bare-metal Linux infrastructure end-to-end — from BIOS/firmware settings through kernel tuning to application-level performance.
• Implement and maintain precision time synchronization (PTP/PPS) across the trading environment, ensuring nanosecond-level accuracy.
• Configure and tune kernel-bypass networking (Onload / OpenOnload, DPDK, or similar) for ultra-low-latency market data and order paths.
• Profile and eliminate latency at every layer: hardware interrupts, CPU isolation and pinning, NUMA topology, memory allocation, network stack.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code for repeatable, auditable deployments across physical hosts.
• Develop monitoring and observability tooling focused on latency distribution, jitter, and tail-latency anomalies — not just uptime.
• Collaborate with quantitative developers and trading teams to understand workload characteristics and codesign infrastructure around them.
• Manage network infrastructure including switch configuration, multicast, and colocation connectivity where applicable.

The Right Candidate

• 4+ years in a Linux infrastructure, SRE, or performance engineering role — experience in an HFT or electronic trading firm is strongly preferred.
• Deep Linux systems knowledge: kernel tuning (sysctl, cgroups, isolcpus, tickless kernels), scheduling policies, memory management, and storage I/O.
• Hands-on experience with kernel-bypass networking — Solarflare/Xilinx Onload, ef_vi, DPDK, or similar frameworks.
• Solid understanding of PTP (IEEE 1588), PPS, and time synchronization architecture at scale.
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) and experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, Salt, or similar).
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar) in a bare-metal or on-prem context.
• Comfort working with hardware: server selection, NIC selection and firmware, BIOS tuning, and colocation environments.
• Familiarity with performance profiling tools: perf, ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF/bpftrace, cyclictest.

Bonus:

• Experience with FPGA-based networking or hardware timestamping.
• Knowledge of market data protocols (ITCH, OUCH, FIX) or exchange connectivity.
• Familiarity with InfiniBand or RoCE fabrics.
• Experience with compliance and security standards relevant to financial environments (ISO 27001, SOC 2).
• Exposure to container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) for non-latency-critical workloads and tooling

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: Up to €120.000,00 per year

Work Location: In person