Systems Engineer

Aquatic was founded with a shared passion for tackling some of the most complex challenges in one of the worlds most competitive arenasglobal financial markets. From the very beginning we have been driven by a deep commitment to applying cutting-edge scientific research and technological innovation to deliver unparalleled performance. Our journey is one of continuous growth and exploration marked by a spirit of curiosity and relentless drive for excellence.

Aquatic Capital Management is seeking a Systems Engineer to join our team.

Systems Engineer

Infrastructure & Research Computing

Aquatic Capital Management Chicago IL Full-Time

About the Role

• We are hiring a Systems Engineer to join our Infrastructure team. This is a senior individual contributor role with significant architectural ownership and real accountability for how our research and trading systems compute.
• You will own and evolve the compute infrastructure that powers quantitative research and production trading at Aquatic: our on-premise grid hybrid cloud compute (GCP and AWS) GPU workloads storage systems and the automation that ties it all together.

What You Will Do

Grid & High-Performance Computing

• Own and evolve Aquatics Slurm and Ray cluster infrastructure across on-prem and GCP supporting research and trading workloads including fitting tuning backtesting feature computation and market data processing.
• Drive architectural improvements to capacity scheduling efficiency and throughput across the full footprint including GPU computation.
• Design and maintain the connectivity and automation between on-prem and cloud environments
• Evaluate and implement newer compute paradigms as research needs evolve

Storage & Performance

• Own high-performance storage systems including VAST (NFS and S3-compatible) ensuring data access is fast and reliable across research trading and build workloads.
• Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks at the intersection of storage network and compute.

Developer Experience & Automation

• Design and maintain provisioning systems for complex compute resources and datacenter onboarding.
• Own and improve CI/CD infrastructure (GitHub Actions) as well as the development toolchain for the broader engineering organization.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Serve as the go-to architect for infrastructure decisions; provide technical direction and help establish vision across the team.
• Pair with and mentor earlier-career Systems & Software Engineers helping them develop sound instincts and grow their skills.
• Diagnose and resolve the hardest most obscure system issues that others cannot get to the bottom of.

What We Are Looking For

Required

• 10 years of experience in systems engineering infrastructure or a closely related discipline.
• Deep Unix/Linux expertise across multiple distributions; comfortable at every layer of the stack.
• Strong experience with HPC grid systems (SLURM preferred) in a research or scientific computing environment.
• Experience provisioning and managing bare-metal infrastructure and data centers not just cloud-native environments.
• Familiarity with high-performance / parallel storage systems (VAST GPFS Lustre or similar).
• Strong scripting and automation fluency (Bash Python or similar); able to build tools that others rely on and to contribute to and own production codebases.
• Ability to operate as an independent technical leader: establishing direction building trusted relationships and communicating clearly with stakeholders outside the team.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with distributed compute frameworks such as Ray Dask or Spark in a research context.
• Low-level systems programming on Linux using C/C with a focus on performance and reliability.
• Experience with GPU computation and instrumenting GPU utilization for ML/research workloads.
• Hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure on GCP (or comparable major cloud) including autoscaling compute clusters.
• Strong networking fundamentals; able to design and troubleshoot complex network topologies including cloud interconnects.
• Background working alongside quantitative researchers or software engineers in a trading finance or research-intensive organization.

What Makes You Stand Out

• You have an architectural mindset: you think about how systems will fail before they do and you build for stability and operational simplicity.
• You are energized by the intersection of systems and the people who use them. You want researchers and engineers to have great tools not just working ones.
• You are a patient generous mentor. You grow the people around you.
• You are direct give well-reasoned dissenting opinions when you have them and do not let ideas roll by unchallenged when you see a better path.

The base salary for this role is anticipated to be between $150000 and $300000 which is based on information at the time of posting. This position may also be eligible for additional forms of compensation such as a discretionary bonus and benefits. Discretionary bonus can be a significant portion of total compensation. Actual compensation for successful candidates will be carefully determined based on a number of factors including their unique skills qualifications and relevant experience.

Benefits:

• Benefits: For full-time employees fully paid medical dental and vision for employees and dependents competitive 401k plan employer-paid life & disability insurance
• Perks: Wellness programs casual dress snacks lunch game room team and company events
• Development: Open environment to maximize learning and knowledge sharing
• Time: Generous PTO paid holidays competitive paid caregiver leaves

Aquatic Capital

This role represents a unique opportunity to join a quantitative investment manager in its early stage of growth. The firms culture will be shaped by collaboration meritocracy ambition and calm determination.

Aquatic is a proud equal opportunity workplace. We do not discriminate based upon race religion color national origin sex sexual orientation gender identity/expression age status as a protected veteran status as an individual with a disability or any other applicable legally protected characteristics.