Network Engineer - Wireless

Jump Trading•Chicago, IL

5d•$175,000 - $215,000•Onsite

About The Position

Jump Trading Group is committed to world class research. We empower exceptional talents in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to seek scientific boundaries, push through them, and apply cutting edge research to global financial markets. Our culture is unique. Constant innovation requires fearlessness, creativity, intellectual honesty, and a relentless competitive streak. We believe in winning together and unlocking unique individual talent by incenting collaboration and mutual respect. At Jump, research outcomes drive more than superior risk adjusted returns. We design, develop, and deploy technologies that change our world, fund start-ups across industries, and partner with leading global research organizations and universities to solve problems. Tower Pros is the dedicated field operations support team for some of the most successful HFTs in the world. It is our responsibility to build and maintain first-in-class wireless networks that compete in the fast-paced, ever-evolving landscape of financial markets. This is a team for individuals that are truly interested in having their skillsets consistently challenged and actively want to learn new skills as the needs of the business grow. We are focused on a team environment, and the most successful applicants will work as part of a team to constantly deliver and improve on the work produced. This role sits at the intersection of software, RF engineering, and network operations. Underneath all of it is one standard: our paths should be the fastest in the market and stay that way. moving target, so this job is as much about finding the next microsecond as defending the ones we already have.

Requirements

Degree in Electrical or Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience in RF, telecom, or network operations.
Strong practical Python for automation, device integration, and data pipelines. This goes beyond one-off scripts: you have built and maintained tools that other engineers depend on.
Linux/UNIX proficiency, including advanced shell usage and git-based workflows.
Networking fundamentals: routing, multicast, Ethernet, VLANs, and L1 optical equipment.
Practical experience with SNMP and out-of-band management of remote devices.
RF fundamentals: path analysis, signal modulation, spectrum analysis, interference, and antenna systems.
Demonstrated ability to direct external and remote parties toward a deadline, from vendors and contractors to field crews and carriers, across multiple time zones.
A rigorous approach to change control in a production environment where mistakes are measured in microseconds and dollars.
Willingness to travel domestically and internationally to towers, rooftops, data centers, and rural greenfield sites.
Availability for a follow-the-sun on-call rotation across Americas, EMEA, and APAC, including occasional weekend and off-hours maintenance windows.
Creativity, attention to detail, and a competative drive.

Nice To Haves

Experience building monitoring and observability infrastructure such as Grafana, Icinga, Splunk, ClickHouse or other time-series databases, and Device42 or similar inventory systems.
Experience with metric collection and hardware control over REST APIs, DMVPN, LTE, and cloud service routers.
Experience benchmarking network path performance at high precision, including timestamp analysis, one-way delay measurement, or comparative latency studies across routes or providers.
Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), configuration management, and CI/CD practices.
Regulatory processes: FCC licensing and ASR, FAA filings, zoning and permitting, or telecom site development.
RF and optical test equipment: spectrum analyzers, BER testers, OTDR or light meters.
Commercial contract, lease, or public procurement experience.
GIS tooling such as ArcGIS and KML/KMZ workflows
Direct experience with microwave, millimeter, HF, or optical transport is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Build and run the monitoring and mapping platforms that give the team a live view of the network, including the telemetry pipelines that collect and baseline link performance (RSSI, SNR, BER), the alerting that fires off them, and the interfaces engineers actually work in.
Write device control and protocol integrations for amplifiers, radios, controllers, and power systems over serial/TCP, SNMP, and vendor APIs.
Develop AI and LLM-assisted diagnostic and chat-ops tooling that shortens incident triage and on-call response.
Manage radio and link configuration as code in git, so that changes to the network are reviewed, versioned, and repeatable.
Build the measurement and analysis tooling that benchmarks our paths against what the market is achieving, identifies where we lead and where we have slipped, and turns the gap into a recommendation worth building.
Work public regulatory, spectrum, and structure datasets (FCC ULS, ASR, prior coordination filings, and international equivalents) as research inputs, and translate what they show into route and site strategy.
Design and evaluate wireless paths: line of sight and Fresnel clearance, link budgets, and antenna and mount geometry.
Run frequency studies and prior coordination for new and modified licensed links.
Engineer the wireline side of wireless: DWDM channel planning, dark fiber turn-ups, exchange cross connects, and precision timing.
Commission new links across licensed microwave, millimeter wave, free space optics, and shortwave, verifying post-cutover performance against expected receive levels.
Lead incident response on production paths: triage, fault isolation, signal spectrum analysis, and historical performance review, culminating in a documented fault hypothesis and parts list for field repair.
Drive every incident through resolution and postmortem, and feed what broke back into the monitoring, tooling, and network design so it can't break the same way twice.
Plan and execute changes on live networks, including maintenance window planning and formal outage notification to external counterparties.
Write the runbooks and field work instructions that let remote crews and on-call engineers execute reliably without you on the line.
Identify and develop new sites: towers, rooftops, water tanks, data centers, and greenfield land.