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Salary: USD 179,000 - 226,000 / annual
FalconX is a pioneering institutional crypto trading platform that bridges traditional finance and digital assets. The company provides comprehensive solutions for digital asset strategies, addressing fragmentation and complexity in cryptocurrency markets.
As a Senior Trading Systems DevOps Engineer, you will own the infrastructure and operational excellence of FalconX's core low-latency trading platforms. This is a hands-on role requiring deep expertise in microsecond-level performance optimization and production reliability.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build, scale, and optimize core low-latency trading platforms, architecting 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.
- 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.
- Collaborate across teams to enhance platform reliability, performance, scalability, and security.
- 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.
Requirements:
- 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.
