Systems Engineer

Aquatic Capital Management•Chicago, IL

21h•Onsite

About The Position

Aquatic Capital Management is seeking 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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.
An architectural mindset: you think about how systems will fail before they do, and you build for stability and operational simplicity.
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.
A patient, generous mentor. You grow the people around you.
Direct, give well-reasoned dissenting opinions when you have them, and do not let ideas roll by unchallenged when you see a better path.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve Aquatic's 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.
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.
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.
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.