The Role:We're looking for a Junior Systems Engineer with 1-5 years of hands-on experience to support and maintain critical Linux infrastructure in a high-performance, low-latency trading environment. You will assist in managing the full server lifecycle - from racking physical hardware to supporting production servers, OpenShift clusters, and Ceph storage environments. This is a highly collaborative, growth-oriented role: you will handle user access, backups, and security protocols while working directly with end users to resolve issues and improve daily operations. You will help build, debug, and maintain the systems that trading depends on, with ample opportunity to develop your systems architecture and performance tuning skills.
Responsibilities:- Infrastructure Lifecycle: Execute the end-to-end server lifecycle, including racking, cabling, configuring, and maintaining physical hardware in our regional data centers.
- Support OpenShift/Kubernetes: Assist in deploying, scaling, and operating OpenShift clusters; help monitor cluster health, perform upgrades, and manage basic workload scheduling.
- Maintain Ceph Storage: Monitor and administer Ceph clusters, assist with capacity management, and learn to optimize distributed storage for throughput and latency.
- Access & Security Management: Manage users, granular access controls, and security protocols. Monitor backup systems to ensure data integrity and system resilience.
- Performance Monitoring: Learn and apply basic OS-level optimizations to support latency-sensitive applications; assist senior engineers with advanced kernel tuning (NUMA, CPU pinning).
- Production Reliability: Respond to and resolve incident tickets within required SLAs. Proactively monitor complex hardware/software issues, participate in root cause analysis (RCA), and escalate critical incidents to senior team members appropriately.
- Automation Support: Write, maintain, and execute automation scripts using Ansible, Terraform, or Python to reduce manual toil across bare-metal and virtualized environments.
- User Support: Work directly with trading and development end users to troubleshoot daily issues and provide reliable infrastructure support.
You Bring:- 1-5 years of Linux systems administration experience in production environments (RHEL/Rocky/CentOS strongly preferred).
- Foundational knowledge of containerization (Docker/Podman) with an eagerness to learn OpenShift and Kubernetes cluster operations.
- Exposure to or a strong interest in learning distributed storage systems (like Ceph) and failure domain design.
- Solid data center operations experience - server racking, cabling, hardware troubleshooting, and out-of-band access (IPMI/iDRAC/iLO).
- Solid troubleshooting skills - you are comfortable diving into system logs, monitoring tools, and basic network stacks to isolate issues.
- Clear communication skills - ability to interface directly with developers and traders to resolve technical issues promptly.
- A strong interest in electronic trading environments and low-latency systems.
- Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification is required; working toward or holding a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification is considered a strong bonus.
- You are a proactive, naturally curious person who values transparent communication and thrives in a mentorship-rich environment.
We Offer:The anticipated base salary for this role is $100,000 - $200,000. This range is representative of starting base salaries at Summit Securities Group; the final offer and placement within this range will be based on job-related factors such as relevant experience, skills, and location. Please note that base salary is only one component of our total compensation package and does not include performance-based bonuses.
We offer competitive compensation, 401(K) matching, gender-neutral parental leave, and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance. We believe that working together in person is key to tackling the complex challenges we face. This role will require being in the office 5 days per week for the first 6 months. In-office perks include lunch stipends, fully stocked kitchens, happy hours, and a great location with amazing colleagues.
