Senior Trading Systems DevOps Engineer

Description

Who are we?

FalconX is a pioneering team of operators, investors, and builders committed to revolutionizing institutional access to the crypto markets. Operating at the intersection of traditional finance and 
cutting-edge technology, FalconX addresses the industry's foremost challenges: Navigating the digital asset market can be complex and fragmented, with limited products and services that support trading strategies, structures, and liquidity found in conventional financial markets. As a comprehensive solution for all digital asset strategies from start to scale, FalconX operates as the connective tissue empowering clients with seamless navigation through the ever-
evolving cryptocurrency landscape.

Responsibilities

• Build, scale, and optimize core low-latency trading platforms.
• Architect AWS and hybrid cloud infrastructure for microsecond execution using kernel tuning (isolcpus), AWS Placement Groups, and enhanced networking (ENA/ENI).
• Design and maintain release pipelines for core trading engines (OMS, EMS, Gateways), ensuring zero-downtime deployments and deterministic rollbacks.
• Collaborate across teams to enhance platform reliability, performance, scalability, and security.
• Provision high-throughput messaging paths (Aeron, FIX gateways) to support venue expansions for market making and regional growth.
• Drive infrastructure automation, network topology design, and OS configurations using Terraform and Ansible.
• Build real-time telemetry pipelines using Grafana Cloud, Alloy, and Prometheus to detect latency spikes and system issues.
• Drive continuous platform efficiency, reduce tick-to-trade latency, and accelerate deployment cycles.
• Practice sustainable incident response, reduce MTTR, establish error budgets, and conduct blameless postmortems.
• Share on-call rotation duties and serve as a primary escalation point for production incidents.
• Enforce security best practices across all trading infrastructure to minimize attack surfaces and guarantee data integrity.
• Minimum Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree with 5+ years of experience as an Infrastructure or Systems Engineer in low-latency electronic trading environments.
• Deep Linux kernel knowledge: performance tuning, memory management, and network I/O optimization (isolcpus, CPU pinning, ring buffers).
• Hands-on expertise optimizing AWS low-latency constructs (Placement Groups, ENA/ENI, high-performance EC2 selection).
• Proven track record productionizing low-latency trading systems across cloud, on-prem, and colocation environments.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines for stateful trading systems using Jenkins, ArgoCD, or GitHub Actions.
• Direct experience with FIX protocol execution flows and low-latency Aeron messaging (IPC/UDP).
• Strong knowledge of physical network design, TCP/IP, UDP, WebSockets, and low-latency routing.
• Advanced proficiency with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and Ansible for configuration management.
• Solid experience managing containerized workloads via Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes.
• Experience securing container base images using minimal distributions like Chainguard.
• Expertise in observability, debugging, and system tuning using Grafana Cloud, Alloy, or Prometheus.
• Fluent in Python and Bash scripting.
• Preferred Qualifications
• Hands-on development exposure to Rust or Java for cross-functional debugging of execution engines.
• Experience implementing operational frameworks (SLOs, SLAs, Error Budgets) for trading desks.
• Deployment expertise with canary and blue/green release strategies for stateful systems.
• Strong analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills under time-sensitive conditions.
• Working knowledge of databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and key-value stores (Redis).
• Exposure to algorithmic trading strategies, market-making mechanics, or crypto exchange APIs.
• The base pay for this role is expected to be between $179,000-$226,000 in the New York City Area. This expected base pay range is based on information at the time this post was generated. This role will also be eligible for other forms of compensation such as a performance linked bonus, equity, and a competitive benefits package. Actual compensation for a successful candidate will be determined based on a number of factors such as location, skillset, experience, qualifications and the level at which the candidate is hired.
• Inclusivity Statement
• FalconX is committed to building a diverse, inclusive, equitable, and safe workspace for all people. Our roles are intended for people from all walks of life. We encourage all those interested in applying to our organization to submit an application regardless if you are missing some of the listed background requirements, skills, or experiences!
• As part of our commitment to inclusivity, FalconX would like to acknowledge that the EEOC survey has limited potential responses that you can select. For legal reasons, FalconX must use this language to align with federal requirements, however, we want to ensure that you are able to provide a response to our own voluntary survey questions about your identity that best aligns with your most true self.
• FalconX is an equal opportunity employer and will not discriminate against an applicant or employee based on race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, sex (including gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), age, physical or mental disability, veteran or military status, genetic information, citizenship, or any other legally-recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law.