Linux Systems Engineer

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced Linux Systems Engineer to join a high-performance technology team within a high-frequency trading firm.

The role will focus on building, maintaining and optimizing bare-metal Linux infrastructure, with an emphasis on ultra-low-latency performance, hardware optimization and system reliability.

The ideal candidate will have deep Linux engineering experience, strong knowledge of operating system internals and hands-on experience working with physical server hardware in performance-critical environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain high-performance bare-metal Linux infrastructure.
• Provision, configure and manage physical servers, including OS installation, BIOS, firmware and hardware configuration.
• Optimize Linux systems for low latency, high throughput and minimal system jitter.
• Perform kernel tuning, CPU isolation, IRQ affinity, NUMA optimization and CPU scheduling configuration.
• Analyze and troubleshoot hardware, kernel and operating system performance issues.
• Work with network engineering teams to optimize low-latency Linux networking.
• Automate infrastructure deployment, configuration and management.
• Develop tooling and scripts to improve infrastructure performance and operational efficiency.
• Work closely with developers, quantitative researchers and trading teams to support critical trading infrastructure.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong commercial experience as a Linux Systems Engineer or Linux Infrastructure Engineer.
• Extensive hands-on experience building and managing Linux on bare-metal physical servers.
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, kernel architecture and operating system behavior.
• Experience with Linux performance tuning and low-latency optimization.
• Strong knowledge of CPU architecture, NUMA, memory management, interrupts and processor scheduling.
• Experience with server hardware, BIOS/UEFI and firmware configuration.
• Strong troubleshooting and performance analysis capabilities.
• Proficiency in Bash and/or Python scripting.
• Experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management.

Desirable Experience

• Experience optimizing Linux for microsecond or sub-microsecond latency.
• Knowledge of Solarflare, Xilinx or NVIDIA/Mellanox network cards.
• Experience with DPDK, OpenOnload, RDMA or kernel bypass technologies.
• Understanding of TCP/IP, UDP, multicast and high-performance networking.
• Familiarity with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC architectures.
• Experience with PTP, hardware timestamping and colocated data center environments.