Linux Systems Engineer at Summit Securities Group – New York, New York

Human Intuition. Machine Intelligence. Relentless Exploration.
Exceptional trading emerges where human intuition meets frictionless experimentation. Our platform and processes enable traders to rapidly investigate ideas, identify emergent patterns, and convert insights into live strategies. This synthesis creates a flywheel of discovery—the key to our pursuit of excellence.
The Role:
We're looking for a Senior Systems Engineer with 5–8 years of hands-on experience to own critical Linux infrastructure in a high-performance, low-latency trading environment. You will manage the full server lifecycle — from racking physical hardware to running production servers, OpenShift clusters and Ceph storage at scale. This is a technical ownership role: you will manage users, access controls, backup, and security while working directly with end users to explore optimal solutions that enhance our infrastructure and development processes. You design, build, debug, and optimize the systems that trading depends on, and you have direct influence over where the platform goes next.
Responsibilities:

• Infrastructure Lifecycle: Own the end-to-end server lifecycle, including racking, configuring, and maintaining physical hardware in our regional data centers.
• Run OpenShift/Kubernetes in production: Deploy, scale, and operate OpenShift clusters; own cluster lifecycle management, upgrades, node tuning, and workload scheduling for latency-sensitive applications.
• Operate Ceph storage at scale: Architect and administer Ceph clusters, optimize for throughput and latency, and manage capacity.
• Access & Security Management: Manage users, granular access controls, and comprehensive security protocols. Ensure robust backup strategies are in place to guarantee data integrity and system resilience.
• Performance & Latency Optimization: Apply kernel, CPU, NIC, and OS-level optimizations (NUMA, IRQ affinity, CPU isolation, huge pages) to meet sub-millisecond performance targets in live trading systems.
• Production Reliability: Design for high availability and lead root cause analysis on production incidents. Proactively monitor and troubleshoot complex hardware/software issues, respond to and resolve incident tickets within required SLAs, and serve as the escalation point for critical incidents.
• Automation-First Engineering: Eliminate manual toil by leveraging Ansible, Terraform, or Python to automate deployments across bare-metal and virtualized environments.
• Innovation & R&D: Continuously research, evaluate, and implement emerging technologies to build better, more resilient solutions for our hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
• User-Centric Collaboration: Work directly with trading and development end users to explore and implement optimal solutions and applications that enhance both the infrastructure and the overall development process.

You Bring:

• 5–8 years of Linux systems engineering experience in production environments (RHEL/Rocky/CentOS strongly preferred).
• Deep, hands-on expertise with OpenShift and/or Kubernetes — cluster operations, CRI-O/container, resource management, and production troubleshooting.
• Proven experience with Ceph distributed storage — OSD tuning, CRUSH maps, BlueStore, and failure domain design.
• Strong consultative skills — ability to interface directly with developers and traders to translate business needs into technical infrastructure improvements.
• Solid data center operations experience — server racking, cabling, firmware management, and out-of-band access (IPMI/iDRAC/iLO).
• Strong background in optimizing Linux systems for low-latency workloads — kernel tuning, CPU pinning, NUMA topology, and network stack optimization.
• Experience supporting or directly working in financial services or electronic trading environments.
• Sharp debugging skills across the full stack — you can go from a trading alert to a kernel trace without needing to be pointed in the right direction.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) certification is required.
• You are a proactive, naturally curious person who values transparent communication.

We Offer:
The anticipated base salary for this role is $150,000 - $250,000. This range is representative of starting base salaries at Summit Securities Group; the final offer and placement within this range will be based on job-related factors such as relevant experience, skills, and location. Please note that base salary is only one component of our total compensation package and does not include performance-based bonuses.
We offer competitive compensation, 401(K) matching, gender-neutral parental leave, and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance. We believe that working together in person is key to tackling the complex challenges we face, which is why this role may require being in the office up to 2 days per week. In-office perks include lunch stipends, fully stocked kitchens, happy hours, and a great location with amazing colleagues.
Our top priority is our people. We invest in a culture that promotes togetherness—supporting one another through challenges and celebrating our collective successes. We believe that modern workplaces thrive on diverse, high-performance workforces across ideas, cultures, and experiences. We are committed to making this environment a daily reality and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.