Trading Platform Engineer

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Full Time Chicago, IL, US

3 days ago Requisition

Salary Range: $90,000.00 To $ Annually

We are a dynamic and growing trading firm seeking an innovative Trading Platform Engineer to join our team. This role is pivotal to one of our core missions: developing cutting-edge automated trading strategies.

Our primary trading assets are equity options and equities, with an exciting expansion into futures on the horizon. As a key member of our relatively small but rapidly expanding team, you will have the opportunity to make substantial contributions and experience significant upward mobility within the company. Your work will not only shape the future of our trading operations but also influence the evolution of our commercial products.

We’re looking for a problem-solver who stays calm under pressure and is eager to grow their technical skills. The right candidate will strongly desire to deepen their knowledge of Linux, networking, and programming while providing exceptional support to our team. This is a unique chance to be part of a firm where individual efforts have a direct and meaningful impact.

This role offers the potential for annual performance-based bonuses. If you're ready to join a high-impact team in a fast-paced, innovation-driven environment, we’d love to hear from you.

• Manage the hypervisor environment used to provision and run trader virtual machines — sizing, capacity planning, patching, snapshots, backups, and decommissioning as needs evolve.
• Maintain and extend the Python interface that traders' scripts use to communicate with our C++ strategy applications, coordinating with the C++ team on protobuf schema and interface changes.
• Provision and configure new VMs for traders, ensuring they have the right resources and connectivity to the scripting platform.
• Onboard traders onto the platform and serve as their first line of support — diagnosing and resolving environment, connectivity, and script-execution issues.
• Build internal tooling and automation (largely in Python) to streamline provisioning, monitoring, and support workflows.
• Administer the underlying Linux systems and troubleshoot connectivity between the Chicago office and the NY-colocated infrastructure.
• Write and maintain documentation , runbooks, and self-service guides for traders and the IT team.
• Collaborate with the C++ and C# engineering teams as part of the broader technology organization.

• Solid Linux system administration experience: provisioning, networking, service/package management, and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in Python — able to read, maintain, and extend a shared library or interface, not just write one-off scripts.
• Strong troubleshooting instincts and a genuine service orientation toward technical end users.
• Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, firewalls, cross-site connectivity troubleshooting).
• Clear written and verbal communication, and comfort working directly with non-engineer users on a trading desk.

• Hands-on experience with a virtualization/hypervisor platform (e.g., Proxmox, VMware ESXi, KVM, Hyper‑V).
• Experience at a trading firm, in financial services, or in another low‑latency / production-critical environment.
• Familiarity with protobuf (or gRPC) and inter-process / network communication patterns.
• Ability to read C++ well enough to understand the applications the Python interface talks to.
• Prior experience supporting traders or other demanding technical end users.
• Configuration management / IaC (Ansible, Terraform) and/or containerization (Docker).
• Monitoring and alerting tooling (Prometheus/Grafana, Zabbix, etc.).
• Experience packaging and versioning internal Python libraries; familiarity with CI/CD.