Freelance Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in Illinois

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.