About the role
QuantFlow is partnering with an established proprietary trading and market making firm in Amsterdam. The firm runs its own bare metal, colocated trading infrastructure where latency is measured in nanoseconds and every kernel tuning decision matters. As SRE / Linux Performance Engineer you own that infrastructure end to end, from BIOS and firmware through the kernel to application level performance, and you work directly with quantitative developers and traders.
What you will do
- Own and optimise bare metal Linux infrastructure end to end: BIOS and firmware settings, kernel tuning and application level performance
- Implement and maintain precision time synchronisation (PTP/PPS) across the trading environment with nanosecond level accuracy
- Configure and tune kernel bypass networking (Onload/OpenOnload, DPDK or similar) for ultra low latency market data and order paths
- Profile and remove latency at every layer: hardware interrupts, CPU isolation and pinning, NUMA topology, memory allocation and the network stack
- Build CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code for repeatable, auditable deployments across physical hosts
- Build monitoring focused on latency distribution, jitter and tail latency, not just uptime
- Manage network infrastructure including switch configuration, multicast and colocation connectivity
What they are looking for
- 4+ years in a Linux infrastructure, SRE or performance engineering role; HFT or electronic trading experience is strongly preferred
- Deep Linux systems knowledge: kernel tuning (sysctl, cgroups, isolcpus, tickless kernels), scheduling, memory management and storage I/O
- Hands-on kernel bypass networking: Solarflare/Xilinx Onload, ef_vi, DPDK or similar
- A solid understanding of PTP (IEEE 1588), PPS and time synchronisation architecture
- Strong Bash and Python, with Ansible, Salt or similar, and CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab CI) in a bare metal or on-prem setting
- Comfort with hardware: server and NIC selection, NIC firmware, BIOS tuning and colocation
- Profiling tools such as perf, ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF/bpftrace and cyclictest
- A plus: FPGA networking or hardware timestamping, ITCH/OUCH/FIX, InfiniBand or RoCE
What they offer
- Base salary up to EUR 110,000
- Ownership of the full infrastructure stack of a trading firm, close to the traders who depend on it
- A role based in Amsterdam