Senior DevOps Engineer - Kubernetes Platform | Global Proprietary Trading Firm (Chicago)

(Up to c. $300k Comp Package (or equivalent) | Office-Led Working)

Role Overview

We’re representing a highly successful proprietary trading firm that is expanding a small, high-impact platform engineering team responsible for the core infrastructure supporting trading and software engineering across the business. The team has recently designed and built a modern on-premises platform from the ground up, centred around Kubernetes, GitOps, observability and developer self-service, and is now entering its next stage of scale and adoption.

This is a senior individual contributor role with genuine end-to-end ownership across cluster lifecycle, platform reliability, automation and tooling, rather than a traditional ticket-driven DevOps position. You’ll work closely with trading desks and engineering teams, helping evolve the platform, solve complex infrastructure problems and improve how internal users deploy, observe and operate production workloads...

Role Snapshot

• Around 6-9 years of experience across DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering or production infrastructure, with a strong hands-on background in technically demanding environments
• Own and evolve production Kubernetes environments, bringing deep expertise across cluster provisioning, upgrades, networking, storage, RBAC, Helm, autoscaling and operational troubleshooting
• Help scale a multi-cluster, bare-metal Kubernetes platform, improving lifecycle automation, capacity management, resilience, disaster recovery and consistency across infrastructure environments
• Strong Linux engineering fundamentals, including system services, networking, storage, resource utilisation, performance analysis and complex production troubleshooting
• Develop and operate observability infrastructure across metrics, logging and distributed tracing, using technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, OpenTelemetry, Mimir, Loki and Tempo. Improve dashboards, alerting and telemetry adoption across engineering teams
• Design and maintain reusable CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Artifactory, Flux, GitHub Actions or comparable technologies, improving deployment reliability and developer productivity
• Build infrastructure automation and internal tooling across provisioning, configuration management, secrets integration and developer self-service, using Terraform, Ansible and practical Python or Go development
• Partner directly with trading desks, developers and infrastructure engineers to onboard services, resolve complex production issues and improve the reliability of P&L-sensitive workloads. Strong communication and pragmatic problem-solving skills are essential
• Improve the platform's long-term scalability through operational standards, documentation, runbooks, automation and self-service capabilities that reduce manual intervention and support wider engineering adoption
• (Preferred) Experience within proprietary trading, hedge funds, market making or similarly latency-sensitive environments, alongside exposure to advanced CNI networking, Kafka, Airflow, Kubeflow or comparable orchestration technologies

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