Linux Systems Engineer — Chicago, IL

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.