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
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.