Freelance Linux System Engineer Jobs in Bolingbrook, IL

Company Name: tastytrade

Role: Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Linux Systems & Application Observability

Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid, 3 days/week in office)

Role Summary
Come join tastytrade, part of IG Group, as we build the reliability practice behind the brokerage platform
that active options, futures, and equities traders rely on every market day. As our first Senior Site
Reliability Engineer, you'll harden the systems behind order execution and market data delivery -
designing for fault tolerance, closing gaps in our telemetry, and making sure our HashiCorp Nomad-based
service fabric scales cleanly as trading volume grows. You'll work embedded alongside our infrastructure
and application engineering teams, contributing directly to our Ruby, Java, and Elixir services. This is a
rare opportunity to shape a practice and a culture from day one, on a platform where every order, quote,
and position has to be right, because real client capital is on the line.

What You'll Do (Job Responsibilities)
Build self-healing, fault-tolerant infrastructure and internal tooling that automates repetitive
operational work and reduces toil for Platform and Application teams.
Run gap analysis across our observability stack to find blind spots in telemetry, logging, and alerting
coverage, then close them so failures surface before customers feel them.
Own scalability work across our HashiCorp Nomad service fabric: capacity planning, load testing,
and identifying architectural bottlenecks before they become incidents.
Extend our observability stack (Prometheus, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry) with the instrumentation
needed to actually see the failure modes above.
Set SLOs and error budgets with multi-window burn-rate alerting for critical brokerage flows, once
the fault-tolerance and telemetry foundation is in place.
Mentor engineers across teams to build a culture of site reliability champions so the practice outlives
any one person.

Who You Are (Skills Needed)
Hands-on experience designing fault-tolerant, self-healing distributed systems - not just describing
the patterns, but having shipped them.
Deep understanding of one or more: distributed systems, Linux systems, cloud-native architectures,
containerization.
Experience running gap analyses on observability/telemetry systems: identifying what's not
instrumented, not alerted on, or not visible until it's too late.
A track record scaling systems under real production load, including capacity planning and
architectural bottleneck identification.
Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana, with the ability to instrument
services directly.
Strong Linux internals and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, UDP/multicast, packet
capture, and flow analysis.
On-call experience on production systems and comfort building a blameless post-incident review
process.
Working knowledge of SLOs and error budgets as a tool, not the job description; HashiCorp Nomad,
Consul, or Vault experience is a strong plus.
Strong programming skills in a language such as Python, Ruby, Java, or similar.

Company Perks + Benefits: 

• Performance Bonuses 
• Stock Purchase Options 
• Medical/Vision/Dental Benefits 
• 401k Plan 
• 20 Paid Vacation Days (plus an additional paid vacation day the month of your birthday!) 
• 10 Paid Sick Days 
• Gym Membership Reimbursement 
• Commuter Benefits 
• Pet Insurance 
• Wellness & Mental Health Programs 
• Charitable Donation Matching 
• Two Paid Volunteer Days Off 
• Daily catered lunch when in the office 
• Full kitchen with snacks and beverages 
• In-building gym 
• Shuttle to/from Metra 

Base Salary Range: $180,000-$200,000 The actual salary offered will be based on the candidate's level of experience and qualifications. 

Discretionary Performance Bonus: 15-20% of base salary based on individual and company performance.  

About IGNA + tasty  
IG North America is home to tastytrade, tastylive & tastyfx-a family of brands built to democratize trading and empower individual investors. Founded in Chicago by the creators of thinkorswim, acquired by London-based IG Group in 2021, we combine startup innovation with the backing of a FTSE 100 fintech operating across five continents serving over 1.3m customers and handling billions of dollars in transactions - built on scale, trust, and proof. 

From our headquarters in Chicago's Fulton Market, our team builds award-winning trading platforms, produces live financial education content daily, and creates technology that makes complex markets accessible. tastytrade is our retail brokerage for self-directed investing and trading, with tastylive providing content to educate our customers. tastyfx is the fastest-growing forex broker in the US. tastycrypto provides self-custody digital wallets for decentralized finance.    

We're a lean, collaborative team that values autonomy, pragmatism, and impact. Whether you're building technology, creating content, serving customers, or supporting operations, you'll work alongside people who are passionate about disrupting traditional finance and genuinely care about helping traders succeed. Our culture rewards initiative, embraces experimentation, and measures success by the value we create for our users. The bar is high - bring a curious and forward-thinking mindset and we'll give you the platform to define what comes next. Join us at IG|tasty - the future gets built here.  
Location:Our office is in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars.  

tastytrade | tastylive | tastyfx  
1330 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607        

*Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they have every single qualification. Our team is dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you're excited about this role, but your experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles!