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Linux Systems Engineer

Posted today

fintal partnersOak Park (IL)

SENIORITY

Senior

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About the role

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.

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