Low Latency Infrastructure Engineering, Equities Trading, Director

Role Overview

Citi Equities Technology is seeking a senior leader for its low-latency infrastructure engineering group. The person in this role will be responsible for design, architecture & delivery of Citi’s trading infrastructure across colocation sites and strategic data center assets.

This role requires a combination of deep technical expertise in low latency infrastructure and networking systems, trading microstructure knowledge and strong leadership and execution capabilities. The successful candidate will lead a global engineering team to deliver platform infrastructure in close partnership with the software delivery teams, Citi’s enterprise technology group and trading functions.

• Define and execute the strategic roadmap for low latency trading infrastructure across Global Equity Markets.
• Architect and deliver high performance colocation environments, connecting exchange venues, market data providers, and internal trading systems.
• Lead design and implementation of ultra‑low latency Layer 1/Layer 2 network infrastructure between exchange colocation facilities and Citi data centers.
• Drive selection, evaluation, and deployment of cutting‑edge low latency switching, routing, timing, and telemetry technologies.
• Work with vendors partners, exchange providers, telecom carriers, and hardware manufacturers to optimize connectivity, resiliency, and performance.
• Design resilient cross‑connect and market access strategies across global exchanges and liquidity venues.
• Establish standards for low latency Linux infrastructure, including operating system optimization, kernel bypass technologies, CPU isolation, NUMA optimization, interrupt tuning, and deterministic performance engineering.
• Lead engineering teams responsible for infrastructure provisioning, bare‑metal automation, deployment pipelines, hardware lifecycle management, and production engineering.
• Develop scalable operational models enabling rapid deployment of trading infrastructure, including procurement workflows, capacity management, rack design, and colocation expansion.
• Build highly secure and compliant environments aligned with Citi operational, cyber, and regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate with application engineering teams to optimize end‑to‑end trading latency and infrastructure determinism.
• Drive observability, performance benchmarking, packet capture analysis, and latency telemetry across the trading stack.
• Manage relationships with exchanges, telcos, connectivity providers, and colocation operators globally.
• Lead incident management and infrastructure resiliency programs for mission‑critical trading environments.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers and technical leads across infrastructure and platform engineering disciplines.

• 15+ years of experience in low latency infrastructure engineering within electronic trading, capital markets, hedge funds, trading venues or equivalent financial institutions.
• Proven experience building and operating exchange colocation environments for Equities or multi‑asset electronic trading platforms.
• Deep expertise in low latency network design, including:
  • Arista, Cisco, Juniper, or equivalent ultra‑low latency switching platforms
  • Layer 1 optimization
  • Multicast market data distribution
  • Precision timing/PTP
  • Optical transport and cross‑connect architecture
  • Exchange connectivity design
• Strong understanding of modern low latency hardware platforms, NICs, FPGA‑enabled environments, and packet processing optimization.
• Advanced Linux systems engineering expertise, particularly:
  • RHEL&Kernel tuning
  • CPU pinning and isolation
  • IRQ balancing
  • NUMA optimization
  • DPDK/XDP/kernel bypass technologies
  • Deterministic systems performance tuning
• Experience designing resilient infrastructure across colocation facilities and large‑scale enterprise data centers.
• Strong knowledge of automation and infrastructure engineering practices using Python, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure‑as‑code methodologies.
• Experience managing hardware procurement, vendor negotiations, colocation buildouts, and telecom contracts.
• Demonstrated ability to lead globally distributed engineering teams in high‑pressure,…