Network Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Position Overview

ScalpTrade is a proprietary trading firm that trades our own capital in the options and equities markets. Our edge is technology: a low-latency stack built in-house and tuned end-to-end, from silicon to strategy. Our engineers work shoulder to shoulder with traders to design, build, and operate the infrastructure that moves markets in microseconds.

The network is the foundation of everything we do — market data in, orders out, with no tolerance for jitter, loss, or drift. We are looking for a Network Engineer who is energized by the challenge of building and running one of the fastest, most reliable networks in the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and support our production trading network end-to-end — exchange connectivity, colocation fabric, campus LAN, and WAN — with a relentless focus on latency, determinism, and reliability.

• Own our low-latency data center fabric on Arista platforms, including multicast market-data distribution (IGMP/PIM), unicast routing (BGP/OSPF), QoS, and buffer/queue tuning to eliminate microbursting and jitter.

• Partner with exchanges, carriers, and hardware vendors to provision, cut over, and troubleshoot market-data feeds and order-entry sessions.

• Take a data-driven, automated approach to diagnosing complex network issues — packet capture and analysis, gap detection, latency measurement, and root-cause investigation across the full path.

• Build and extend network automation and tooling to manage configuration, deployment, and validation as code.

• Design and improve network monitoring and observability (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus/InfluxDB, Zabbix), and contribute to next-generation telemetry.

• Manage firewall and security policy across the estate (e.g. Palo Alto), balancing segmentation and control with the performance the trading path demands.

• Maintain precise documentation of architecture, configurations, and operational runbooks.

• Own initiatives end to end: requirements, design review, implementation, deployment, and handoff.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on network engineering experience, ideally supporting a production, latency-sensitive environment.

• Deep, on-box command of IP networking and TCP/IP, switching, and routing — BGP, OSPF — plus multicast (IGMP, PIM-SM).

• Experience with modern data-center switching hardware; direct experience with Arista is a strong plus (Cisco, Mellanox/NVIDIA also relevant).

• Strong troubleshooting instincts across Ethernet LAN, routing, switching, and packet analysis (tcpdump/Wireshark), with the patience to chase down microbursts, jitter, and packet loss.

• Scripting and automation ability — Python preferred — along with comfort in Git and tools like Ansible.

• Solid Linux fundamentals and shell proficiency.

• Familiarity with firewall administration and multi-tier security architecture (Palo Alto a plus).

• Clear written and verbal communication, and a collaborative, low-ego approach to solving hard problems in a fast-paced environment.

• CCNP/CCIE or equivalent depth.

• Nice to have: experience in trading or financial services; exposure to low-latency techniques (kernel bypass, hardware timestamping, PTP)