Systems Engineer at Aquatic Capital Management

<div class="content-intro"><p><span class="OYPEnA font-feature-liga-off font-feature-clig-off font-feature-calt-off text-decoration-none text-strikethrough-none">Aquatic was founded with a shared passion for tackling some of the most complex challenges in one of the world’s most competitive arenas—global financial markets. From the very beginning, we have been driven by a deep commitment to applying cutting-edge scientific research and technological innovation to deliver unparalleled performance. Our journey is one of continuous growth and exploration, marked by a spirit of curiosity and relentless drive for excellence.&nbsp;</span></p></div><p>Aquatic Capital Management is seeking a Systems Engineer to join our team. &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Systems Engineer</strong></p> <p>Infrastructure &amp; Research Computing</p> <p>Aquatic Capital Management&nbsp; •&nbsp; Chicago, IL&nbsp; •&nbsp; Full-Time</p> <p><strong>About the Role</strong></p> <ul> <li>We are hiring a Systems Engineer to join our Infrastructure team. This is a senior individual contributor role with significant architectural ownership, and real accountability for how our research and trading systems compute.</li> <li>You will own and evolve the compute infrastructure that powers quantitative research and production trading at Aquatic: our on-premise grid, hybrid cloud compute (GCP and AWS), GPU workloads, storage systems, and the automation that ties it all together.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What You Will Do</strong></p> <p><strong>Grid &amp; High-Performance Computing</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own and evolve Aquatic's Slurm and Ray cluster infrastructure across on-prem and GCP — supporting research and trading workloads including fitting, tuning, backtesting, feature computation, and market data processing.</li> <li>Drive architectural improvements to capacity, scheduling efficiency, and throughput across the full footprint, including GPU computation.&nbsp;</li> <li>Design and maintain the connectivity and automation between on-prem and cloud environments</li> <li>Evaluate and implement newer compute paradigms as research needs evolve&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>Storage &amp; Performance</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own high-performance storage systems including VAST (NFS and S3-compatible), ensuring data access is fast and reliable across research, trading, and build workloads.</li> <li>Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks at the intersection of storage, network, and compute.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Developer Experience &amp; Automation</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design and maintain provisioning systems for complex compute resources and datacenter onboarding.</li> <li>Own and improve CI/CD infrastructure (GitHub Actions) as well as the development toolchain for the broader engineering organization.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Technical Leadership &amp; Mentorship</strong></p> <ul> <li>Serve as the go-to architect for infrastructure decisions; provide technical direction and help establish vision across the team.</li> <li>Pair with and mentor earlier-career Systems &amp; Software Engineers, helping them develop sound instincts and grow their skills.</li> <li>Diagnose and resolve the hardest, most obscure system issues that others cannot get to the bottom of.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What We Are Looking For</strong></p> <p><strong>Required</strong></p> <ul> <li>10+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure, or a closely related discipline.</li> <li>Deep Unix/Linux expertise across multiple distributions; comfortable at every layer of the stack.</li> <li>Strong experience with HPC grid systems (SLURM preferred) in a research or scientific computing environment.</li> <li>Experience provisioning and managing bare-metal infrastructure and data centers, not just cloud-native environments.</li> <li>Familiarity with high-performance / parallel storage systems (VAST, GPFS, Lustre, or similar).</li> <li>Strong scripting and automation fluency (Bash, Python, or similar); able to build tools that others rely on and to contribute to and own production codebases.</li> <li>Ability to operate as an independent technical leader: establishing direction, building trusted relationships, and communicating clearly with stakeholders outside the team.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Strongly Preferred</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience with distributed compute frameworks such as Ray, Dask, or Spark in a research context.</li> <li>Low-level systems programming on Linux using C/C++, with a focus on performance and reliability.</li> <li>Experience with GPU computation and instrumenting GPU utilization for ML/research workloads.</li> <li>Hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure on GCP (or comparable major cloud), including autoscaling compute clusters.</li> <li>Strong networking fundamentals; able to design and troubleshoot complex network topologies including cloud interconnects.</li> <li>Background working alongside quantitative researchers or software engineers in a trading, finance, or research-intensive organization.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What Makes You Stand Out</strong></p> <ul> <li>You have an architectural mindset: you think about how systems will fail before they do, and you build for stability and operational simplicity.</li> <li>You are energized by the intersection of systems and the people who use them. You want researchers and engineers to have great tools, not just working ones.</li> <li>You are a patient, generous mentor. You grow the people around you.</li> <li>You are direct, give well-reasoned dissenting opinions when you have them, and do not let ideas roll by unchallenged when you see a better path.</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The base salary for this role is anticipated to be between $150,000 and $300,000, which is based on information at the time of posting. This position may also be eligible for additional forms of compensation, such as a discretionary bonus, and benefits. Discretionary bonus can be a significant portion of total compensation. Actual compensation for successful candidates will be carefully determined based on a number of factors, including their unique skills, qualifications and relevant experience.</span></p><div class="content-conclusion"><p>Benefits:</p> <ul> <li>Benefits: For full-time employees, fully paid medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents, competitive 401k plan, employer-paid life &amp; disability insurance&nbsp;</li> <li>Perks: Wellness programs, casual dress, snacks, lunch, game room, team and company events</li> <li>Development: Open environment to maximize learning and knowledge sharing</li> <li>Time: Generous PTO, paid holidays, competitive paid caregiver leaves</li> </ul> <p><a href="https://www.aquatic.com/">Aquatic Capital </a></p> <p>This role represents a unique opportunity to join a quantitative investment manager in its early stage of growth. The firm’s culture will be shaped by collaboration, meritocracy, ambition, and calm determination.</p> <p>Aquatic is a proud equal opportunity workplace. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics.</p></div>