Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer
Company: tastytrade
Role: Senior Linux Infrastructure Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL — Hybrid
About the Role
We are looking for a senior Linux engineer who is equal parts operator and builder. You will own the systems layer of our production environment — from the metal to the configuration management code. This is a hands-on role: you will jump into incidents, tackle challenging engineering problems, design systems that scale, and evaluate new software and architectures.
This is not a role where the abstractions hide the machine. You are expected to be curious about what is underneath and to be the person other engineers come to when a system is behaving in a way nobody can explain.
What You'll Do
- Own Linux performance. Diagnose and tune systems under real production load: CPU scheduling and NUMA placement, memory and page cache behavior, disk and filesystem I/O, and network stack tuning.
- Lead troubleshooting on hard problems. Work incidents methodically — form a hypothesis, find the cheapest test that falsifies it, and narrow the search rather than changing five things at once. Write postmortems, organize follow-up tasks, and future-proof the environment so the same issue does not recur.
- Write and maintain configuration management code. Build infrastructure declaratively with Salt, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, treating that code with the same standards as application code: reviewed, tested, and version-controlled.
- Run containerized workloads. Build, deploy, and operate services on Kubernetes or Nomad, including scheduling behavior, resource limits, health checking, and the failure modes that only appear under contention.
- Automate in Bash and Python. Replace manual runbooks with tooling and streamline repeatable work.
- Operate core network services. Troubleshoot TCP/IP with confidence and bring solid networking fundamentals. Manage DNS and DHCP as production services — zone management, resolver behavior, TTL strategy, scopes, reservations, and relay configuration.
- Operate the traffic and data tier. Configure and troubleshoot Nginx and HAProxy (routing, TLS termination, health checks, connection handling) and support Redis and RabbitMQ in production.
- Manage virtualization. Provision and maintain guests across VMware, Xen, or KVM, including capacity planning, host maintenance, and live migration.
- Handle secrets properly. Use Vault for secret storage, dynamic credentials, policy, and rotation — and help move the organization off whatever it was doing before.
- Own observability. Maintain log aggregation on the Elastic Stack and alerting through Nagios, CheckMK, or Icinga. Tune alerts toward signal; an alert nobody can act on is a bug.
- Work through change management and code review. Everything moves through Git and pull requests. You will review other people's changes as seriously as you expect yours to be reviewed.
Who You Are
- 6+ years in a Linux systems, infrastructure, or SRE role.
Expert-level Linux, specifically:
- Performance analysis. You can go from a vague complaint to a named subsystem using the standard tooling — perf, strace, ss, iostat, bpftrace, or equivalents — and explain what the numbers mean.
- Troubleshooting methodology. A disciplined, hypothesis-driven approach that works on a system you have never seen before. We care more about how you narrow the problem than about which commands you happen to know.
- Systems fundamentals. Processes and signals, systemd, cgroups and namespaces, filesystems, and what actually happens when a host exhausts memory or file descriptors.
- Declarative configuration management at production scale — Salt, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet. You have authored and maintained the code, not only run it.
- Containerization and orchestration. Production experience with Kubernetes or Nomad, including the operational realities: scheduling, resource pressure, rollouts, and debugging a workload that will not start.
- Scripting and automation. Strong Bash and working Python. You write code that other engineers can maintain.
- Foundational networking. Comfortable across layers — VLANs and routing, DNS, DHCP, TCP behavior, and TLS — and able to determine whether a problem is the application, the host, or the network.
- Proxy and load-balancing experience with Nginx or HAProxy.
- Virtualization experience with at least one of VMware, Xen, or KVM.
- Git and peer review as a daily habit, including the discipline to keep changes reviewable.
- Excellent written communication. Runbooks, design proposals, and incident write-ups are a core part of this job, not an afterthought.
- The ability to get productive quickly in areas where you do not yet have depth.
Preferred Qualifications
- Production ownership of Redis or RabbitMQ as a primary responsibility rather than a dependency.
- Vault administration — policies, auth methods, and rotation at scale.
- Elastic Stack operations at volume: index lifecycle, mapping decisions, and cluster tuning.
- Experience in a regulated environment, or anywhere downtime has a direct revenue cost.
- Colocation or bare-metal experience: hardware lifecycle, remote hands, and capacity planning against a finite footprint.
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: $140,000-$180,000 The actual salary offered will be based on the candidate's level of experience and qualifications.
Discretionary Performance Bonus: 10-12% of base salary based on individual and company performance.
About IGNA + tasty IG North America is home to tastytrade, tasty_live &_ 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 tasty_live_ 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!
About tastylive
tastylive is a financial media company that offers trade and finance-related edutainment content for traders and investors.
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