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.
Aquatic Capital Management is seeking a Systems Engineer to join our team.
Systems Engineer
Infrastructure & Research Computing
Aquatic Capital Management • Chicago, IL • Full-Time
About the Role
- 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.
- 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.
What You Will Do
Grid & High-Performance Computing
- 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.
- Drive architectural improvements to capacity, scheduling efficiency, and throughput across the full footprint, including GPU computation.
- Design and maintain the connectivity and automation between on-prem and cloud environments
- Evaluate and implement newer compute paradigms as research needs evolve
Storage & Performance
- Own high-performance storage systems including VAST (NFS and S3-compatible), ensuring data access is fast and reliable across research, trading, and build workloads.
- Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks at the intersection of storage, network, and compute.
Developer Experience & Automation
- Design and maintain provisioning systems for complex compute resources and datacenter onboarding.
- Own and improve CI/CD infrastructure (GitHub Actions) as well as the development toolchain for the broader engineering organization.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- Serve as the go-to architect for infrastructure decisions; provide technical direction and help establish vision across the team.
- Pair with and mentor earlier-career Systems & Software Engineers, helping them develop sound instincts and grow their skills.
- Diagnose and resolve the hardest, most obscure system issues that others cannot get to the bottom of.
What We Are Looking For
Required
- 10+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure, or a closely related discipline.
- Deep Unix/Linux expertise across multiple distributions; comfortable at every layer of the stack.
- Strong experience with HPC grid systems (SLURM preferred) in a research or scientific computing environment.
- Experience provisioning and managing bare-metal infrastructure and data centers, not just cloud-native environments.
- Familiarity with high-performance / parallel storage systems (VAST, GPFS, Lustre, or similar).
- 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.
- Ability to operate as an independent technical leader: establishing direction, building trusted relationships, and communicating clearly with stakeholders outside the team.
Strongly Preferred
- Experience with distributed compute frameworks such as Ray, Dask, or Spark in a research context.
- Low-level systems programming on Linux using C/C++, with a focus on performance and reliability.
- Experience with GPU computation and instrumenting GPU utilization for ML/research workloads.
- Hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure on GCP (or comparable major cloud), including autoscaling compute clusters.
- Strong networking fundamentals; able to design and troubleshoot complex network topologies including cloud interconnects.
- Background working alongside quantitative researchers or software engineers in a trading, finance, or research-intensive organization.
What Makes You Stand Out
- You have an architectural mindset: you think about how systems will fail before they do, and you build for stability and operational simplicity.
- 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.
- You are a patient, generous mentor. You grow the people around you.
- 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.
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.
Benefits:
- Benefits: For full-time employees, fully paid medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents, competitive 401k plan, employer-paid life & disability insurance
- Perks: Wellness programs, casual dress, snacks, lunch, game room, team and company events
- Development: Open environment to maximize learning and knowledge sharing
- Time: Generous PTO, paid holidays, competitive paid caregiver leaves
Aquatic Capital
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.
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.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure, or related discipline
- Deep Unix/Linux expertise across multiple distributions
- Strong experience with HPC grid systems (SLURM preferred)
- Experience provisioning and managing bare-metal infrastructure and data centers
- Familiarity with high-performance / parallel storage systems
- Strong scripting and automation fluency (Bash, Python, or similar)
- Ability to operate as an independent technical leader
What We Do
Aquatic manages systematic investment strategies, combining a high-performance research and development platform with disciplined risk management. Our team of best-in-class researchers and engineers are working together in a relaxed environment optimized for collaboration, creativity, and performance. Because we are small and nimble, every voice counts. We value diverse backgrounds and are rooted in collaboration, meritocracy, ambition, and steady determination.
