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.

Fullstack Developers at HRT work either on our platform team (i.e. you work on infrastructure & tooling that supports all of our research & trading capabilities) or our acceleration team (i.e. you are aligned with a specific algo research & trading team). All of our Fullstack Developers have internal customers and deeply understand end-user needs. They build backend processes to ingest and transform vast quantities of data, and UIs to visualize and action that data quickly. 

Responsibilities: 

• Work on our in-house distributed-compute framework designed for execution on a large scale within HRT’s compute cluster. This framework serves various teams, with our algo teams being the primary users, particularly for training complex models.
• Work closely with our Algo Developers and traders, building backend processes and UIs for them to oversee trading processes, execute manual trades, assess risk, and research improvements to our strategies.
• Work closely with a variety of senior technical and non-technical users and own projects end-to-end, from inception to gathering and refining requirements, forming and executing a structured plan, and managing ongoing support and iterations to the initial plan.  
• Architect web-based tooling to provide insights and enable real-time actions using financial data, operational data, trading activity, and more using React and Python.

The interview process will evaluate your backend programming skills (primarily Python), and your experience working in JavaScript/TypeScript on a modern web framework (React skills are required!). It is important that you are excited about and comfortable with working on both sides of the stack. All fullstack candidates will go through the same assessment & two technical phone interviews. We will start team alignment discussions if (when!) you get to onsite. To learn more about interviewing for technical and engineering roles at HRT, see this blog! 

Profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Experience working with Python and React
• Experience working with JavaScript or TypeScript
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Excellent multitasking and time management skills
• Ability to work independently and collaborate across teams
• Ability to look at a technical system, understand how it works, and identify how to make it better
• Ability to explain complicated topics to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Driven by curiosity
• Thrives within a team that consistently challenges you to improve the ecosystem around you

The estimated base salary range for this position is 175,000 to 250,000 USD per year (or local equivalent). The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. 

This role will also be eligible for discretionary performance-based bonuses and a competitive benefits package which includes medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance, and enrollment in our company’s retirement savings plans. Employees will receive sick and parental leave, as well as other paid time off (including 20 vacation days and 10 paid holidays in the US). Please note that benefits and time off policies will vary across non-US locations.

Hudson River Trading (HRT) is a quantitative trading firm at the forefront of technological innovation. We build and deploy cutting-edge systems within one of the world’s most advanced computing environments to power our global trading operations. Our non-siloed, collaborative coding environment empowers talented engineers to make significant contributions and see their impact daily. At HRT, you'll be challenged to solve the most complex problems in trading alongside many of the brightest minds in the field.

We are seeking highly motivated and skilled Research Engineers who will work very closely with our Algo Developer (Quant Research) trading teams. These roles require exceptional programming fundamentals, a strong user focus, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with constantly evolving requirements. Multitasking and context switching are inherent aspects of this role, through which you will gain insight into the ideation and execution of some of the world's most sophisticated trading strategies.  

Research Engineers at HRT work on a wide variety of projects. Examples include:

• Designing highly customized quantitative systems that enable Algo Developers to easily express and backtest new predictive signals.
• Building world-class research tooling to speed up Algo Developers’ research iteration.
• Aiding the development and deployment of very large deep learning models for HRT’s live trading.
• Improving HRT’s monetization systems which turn our predictions into profitable trades.
• Evaluating sim vs. live differences to improve the fidelity of our simulations.
• Building systems to monitor and manage live trading.
• Specializing in specific time horizons, from high frequency trading to mid-to-low frequency hedge fund-style strategies.
• Working across a very wide variety of asset classes (from equities to fixed income to options) and regions (from North America to Asia Pacific) – you’ll interact with markets across the world!

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain robust, performant, and scalable software systems.
• Optimize existing codebases for performance, reliability, and efficiency.
• Debug complex issues across distributed systems in a time-sensitive environment.
• Optimize both the mechanics and ergonomics of Algo Developer research workflows; this requires developing a deep intuition for research methodologies.
• Balance the short term goals of individual trading teams with the longer term goals of HRT’s generalized trading platforms across trading teams. Because we don’t work in a pod environment, REs on different trading teams are expected to share technology and ideas.

Qualifications

• Completed a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. If you are currently pursuing your Bachelor's degree, please apply to our Campus/New Grad opportunities.
• Previous experience at a top-tier finance or technology company with an excellent track record of rapid advancement and superlative reviews.
• Experience with supporting internal users is preferred; bonus if you have real hands-on experience with quant research and/or ML/Deep Learning platforms.
• Experience with python numerical, ML and data-oriented libraries is a big plus (e.g. pandas, scikit, pytorch, etc.)
• Candidates should be prepared for technical interviews in either Python or C++. While there is no hard language requirement for RE roles, proficiency in one of these languages will be assessed during the interview process.
• Kindness and empathy is a real requirement. No “smart jerks” at HRT. 
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and design principles.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
• HRT ships every day. The ability to thoughtfully, methodically, and reliably deploy new software and features is a critical skill. 
• If you have management experience, that’s always a bonus – but even so, expect to code!

The estimated base salary range for this position is 200,000 to 300,000 USD per year (or local equivalent). The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role will also be eligible for discretionary performance-based bonuses and a competitive benefits package.

For more info about interviewing at HRT, see this blog!

Hudson River Trading (HRT) is a quantitative trading firm at the forefront of technological innovation. We build and deploy cutting-edge systems within one of the world’s most advanced computing environments to power our global trading operations. Our bottom-up approach to projects and collaborative coding environment empower talented engineers to make significant contributions and see their impact daily. At HRT, you'll be challenged to solve the most complex problems in trading alongside many of the brightest minds in the field.

We are always seeking highly motivated and skilled Software Engineers across many different teams at HRT. These roles demand exceptional programming fundamentals, sharp debugging abilities, and strong critical thinking and communication skills. Engineers at HRT work on a wide variety of platform and trading-adjacent projects. Examples include:

• Improving scheduling efficiency of distributed computations, speeding up research iteration.
• Enhancing developer experience through language tooling, jupyter extensions, and AI tools.
• Leveraging LLMs to make operational support tasks faster and more efficient.
• Profiling computer usage at all levels, from system calls to large scale distributed computations.
• Building systems to interact with trading venues and monitor risk.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain robust, efficient, and scalable software systems.
• Debug complex issues across distributed systems in a time-sensitive environment.
• Contribute to all phases of the software development lifecycle, from ideation to deployment and support.
• Deliver exceptional experiences for internal users; your success will be directly tied to your ability to understand the needs of the people around you and apply your technical skills to efficiently meet them.

Qualifications

• Completed a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. If you are currently pursuing your Bachelor's degree, please apply to our Campus/New Grad opportunities.
• Previous experience at a top-tier finance or technology company with an excellent track record of rapid advancement and superlative reviews.
• Experience with applications of cutting-edge technology is preferred; being a core contributor to said technology is even better.
• Candidates should be prepared for technical interviews in Python. While there is no hard language requirement for these roles, proficiency in one this language will be assessed during the interview process.
• Kindness and empathy is a real requirement. No “smart jerks” at HRT. 
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and design principles.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
• HRT ships every day. The ability to thoughtfully, methodically, and reliably deploy new software and features is a critical skill. 
• If you have management experience, that’s always a bonus – but even so, expect to code!

The estimated base salary range for this position is 200,000 to 300,000 USD per year (or local equivalent). The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role will also be eligible for discretionary performance-based bonuses and a competitive benefits package.

For more info about interviewing at HRT, see this blog!

Working as a coder at Hudson River Trading (HRT) means working on a small, highly productive, and efficient team. You may see "trading" in our name and assume you'll be relegated to some dark corner to code for the "business," but that could not be further from the truth! 

At HRT, an automated trading firm based in NYC, the code you write *is* our business, so it is everyone's job to make sure our developers have everything they need to do their jobs well.

As a member of the AI Tools team, you will be responsible for increasing productivity across the company by integrating the newest AI tools into our users’ workflows. Whether it’s for a Python developer writing a web app, a C++ developer speeding up order execution, a researcher investigating trade signals, or even Business Development meeting with vendors - we are focused on deploying what works.

This is an exciting opportunity to help build and define the AI tooling ecosystem at HRT. You will have to navigate the rapidly evolving options in this space, and adapt them to our own internal systems. You might be fixing auth one day, comparing vendors the next, and coding a new MCP the third. 

Responsibilities

• Help us develop software that improves productivity for every office and department at HRT while using the latest technologies and techniques in software engineering and the broader AI tooling ecosystem.
• HRT has many high-impact areas where we are integrating AI tools; here’s what you could work on:
• Writing a custom MCP wrapper around internal resources.
• Fine-tuning a new code completion model.
• Deploying a new coding assistant across all developer and researcher environments.
• Developing evaluations and iterating on an autonomous coding agent.
• Collaborating with security to improve AI sandboxing.
• Presenting and educating users on best practices.

Profile

• You’re one of the top devs in your current organization, as measured by productivity, technical capability, and helpfulness to other devs.
• Experience deploying and maintaining applications. You’ve managed an application from the design phase through the production phase.
• You’re comfortable with defining direction in an environment of ambiguity and uncertainty. The AI tooling space changes rapidly.
• You really like to work with people who challenge you and make you better at what you do.
• In your spare time you code, tinker, read, explore, break things, and have an insatiable curiosity for all things AI and computer-related.

Qualifications

• Completed a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. If you are currently pursuing your Bachelor's degree, please apply to our Campus/New Grad opportunities.
• Python experience is required, daily use of most recent standards preferred.
• C++ and JavaScript (TypeScript, React) experience a plus.
• Experience with the AI tooling ecosystem (use coding assistants/agentic workflows, ideally have built your own customizations).
• Superior design, debugging, and problem solving skills.
• Knowledge of UNIX operating systems (we use Linux), system/processor performance, and network communication.

The estimated base salary range for this position is 200,000 to 300,000 USD per year (or local equivalent). The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role will also be eligible for discretionary performance-based bonuses and a competitive benefits package.

Hudson River Trading (HRT) is a leading quantitative trading and investment firm specializing in multi-asset class strategies. At the core of our success lies the power of our compute cluster, the foundation where all our trading strategies are conceived and refined.

We’re looking for innovative minds to enhance the data storage libraries and tools leveraged by our Research teams to generate cutting-edge strategies. As a Storage Developer, you’ll dive deep into C++ and advanced storage solutions, working at massive scale to enable groundbreaking research. Surrounded by a team of exceptional developers constantly pushing the boundaries of their expertise, you’ll be amazed at the impact you can achieve.

Profile

• You’re able to talk both high-level distributed systems design trade-offs and low-level OS-level details
• You’re able to balance being detail-oriented with good prioritization of what matters now vs. later
• You thrive in collaborative environments and have a strong sense of ownership
• In your spare time you code, tinker, read, explore, break things, and have an insatiable curiosity for all things computer related

Responsibilities

• Work with a small team of skilled developers to create distributed storage systems customized to fit HRT’s needs
• Stay informed about the current “state of the art” and help bridge the gap between here and there
• Understand our Research team’s storage and compute needs, and build for the next generation of research

Qualifications 

• Proficient C++ experience is required, daily use preferred 
• Distributed systems experience required (ability to reason about fault tolerance, sharding, trade-offs, and designing for simplicity and robustness under failure) 
• Previous experience developing databases, distributed filesystems, search infrastructure, or similar ideal but not required 
• Ability to work productively in a Linux environment
• Knowledge of UNIX operating systems, low-level systems-level performance issues, and networking

The estimated base salary range for this position is 200,000 to 300,000 USD per year (or local equivalent). The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role will also be eligible for discretionary performance-based bonuses and a competitive benefits package.

Role Overview

The Front-End Platform Developer designs, builds, and maintains internal trading systems that support trading visualization, trade management, algorithmic trading logic, risk limit management and trader configuration. This role is highly visible firm wide and partners closely with Trading, Risk, and Technology teams—including regular interaction with senior leadership—to deliver scalable solutions that improve efficiency, accuracy, while reducing latencies across our trading infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain internal toolset, dashboards and various backing services leveraged by our Trading, Support and Risk teams.
• Partner with traders and cross-functional teams to gather requirements and deliver high-impact, scalable solutions.
• Develop and extend the current frontend trading platform and supporting APIs, including various trade entry, management tools and technologies.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and scalability through testing, monitoring, automation, refactoring, and production support.

Required Skills & Experience

• 3–5 years of professional software development experience.
• Strong C# (.NET or .NET Framework) experience building high-performance desktop applications.
• Experience with real-time data processing — TCP, multicast, or similar high-throughput data feeds.
• Experience rendering and interacting with large, rapidly updating datasets in a UI context.
• Familiarity with multithreading, lock-free patterns, and performance profiling/optimization.
• Solid understanding of databases and data modeling (SQL preferred).
• Strong communication skills (verbal, written and presentation skills) and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced trading environment.
• Proven ability to manage stakeholders and concurrent development initiatives, collaborating directly with traders (or similarly collaborative end-users), Support and Technology teams.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with various visualization API technologies such as DirectX or OpenGL.
• Experience developing advanced UI tools leveraging various frontend UI development frameworks.
• Experience developing servers and/or services with C++.
• Experience building complex multithreaded applications, preferably using native Threads and appropriate patterns.
• Exposure to AI or machine learning, particularly applied use cases such as automation or intelligent reporting.
• Experience in trading, financial services, game development, or other high-reliability, time-sensitive environments.
• Experience translating business requirements into clear, maintainable technical solutions.

Compensation 

Base Salary Range: $120,000 - $180,000, plus eligibility for a performance-based bonus. 

Final compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s skills, experience, education, and qualifications. In addition to base salary, Geneva Trading offers a competitive total rewards package, including a comprehensive benefits program. Learn more about our employee incentives here: https://www.genevatrading.com/employee-incentives/ 

Application expected to close: 6/01/2026