Platform Engineer

Maven is a market-leading proprietary trading firm deploying its own capital across discretionary, systematic, and market-making strategies. Backed by deep expertise in trading, technology, and research, we are relentlessly focused on improving liquidity across global listed derivatives. Through advanced execution and pricing technologies, we improve how financial markets operate.

Maven has a culture that is relaxed and informal but highly rewarding of strong performance. We have offices in London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, New York and Chicago. Technology is central to how the firm trades, and the people who join get real ownership of what they work on.

Platform Engineering builds and operates the environment Maven's applications run on: 22 Kubernetes clusters across Europe, the US and Asia, all on-premises, supporting over 1,100 production deployments for 44 teams and desks.

Teams own their own applications and deploy them themselves. Our job is to build the systems and ways of working that let them do that without coming through us: hosted developer environments, a safe path to production, and the clusters those workloads land on. Linux and networking sit with dedicated teams; we sit between that layer and the people building on top of it.

We still get pulled into production problems that cut across stacks, but the aim is always the same: turn a recurring need into something a team can do themselves.

This role is based in our Chicago office. You work US hours with the desks here: understand what they are trying to do, turn that into something they can run themselves, and deal with the production problems that cannot wait for London.

You will work with Platform colleagues in London and Asia, and with the Chicago infrastructure and trading technology teams.

• Sitting with Chicago teams to understand what they are trying to accomplish, including the parts they have not spelled out, and turning that into a requirement the platform team can act on
• Designing better ways of working for those teams: hosted developer environments (Coder), the path from a change to production, templates and checks that make the safe way the easy one
• Recommending how we apply what we already have, and pushing back when a request is the wrong solution
• Following through across the timezone gap so things do not stall when London has gone home
• Being available in US hours when a deployment or application misbehaves, and handling the ones that cannot wait
• Contributing to the shared platform rather than a US-specific fork. One repository, one set of standards
• Working with the Chicago Linux, network and storage teams on anything that spans the hosts and the cluster

Around six years in a platform, SRE, Dev Ops or development role. Depth matters more than the exact number.

• Comfortable working with traders, researchers and developers: you can listen to a messy request, find the actual problem, and explain a proposed approach in their terms
• Able to recommend a direction and to say no when the ask is unreasonable or would make things worse
• Persistent follow-up. A lot of this job is unfinished conversations across a six-hour gap.
• Production Kubernetes: you have deployed to it, debugged a broken change, and can deal with an incident without waiting for someone else. You do not need to have run a fleet.
• Comfortable with Git Ops. We use ArgoCD, Helm and Kustomize;
  Terraform or similar experience transfers.
• Able to write code to automate work. We use Python most of the time;
  Go is also useful.
• Experience building a development or deployment process that other teams then ran themselves.

None of these are required.

• Experience in a trading firm, or another environment where the users of the platform are close to the business. Useful, not required; we have hired well from outside finance.
• Judgment about when to decide locally and when to wait for the rest of the team
• Coder, Gitpod, Code spaces, or another hosted developer environment
• Kubernetes on-premises or on bare metal
• Observability stacks you have operated:
  Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Open Telemetry or similar
• Experience in a new or growing regional team
• Experience using AI-powered tools to improve efficiency and workflows.

• A great engineering environment whereby technology is key to our success.
• The upside of start-up without the associated risks.
• A great, friendly, informal, and highly rewarding culture.
• Informal dress code, loads of free food and…