Platform engineer in low-latency trading

Referment is working with a global options market maker whose low-latency trading platform runs on self-managed, on-premises infrastructure rather than public cloud. The firm trades across global derivatives markets, builds its platform on open-source tooling where it fits, and values a flat, collaborative engineering culture.

• design, build and operate the on-premises Kubernetes platform that sits beneath the firm's application workloads — from the hypervisor and VM provisioning up through Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, networking, storage and the golden-path tooling application teams use to ship software
• designing the VM fabric's hypervisor architecture, host networking topology and storage backing
• designing and maintaining distributed shared storage such as Ceph
• building VM templating and golden-image pipelines
• automating the VM lifecycle end to end via infrastructure-as-code
• managing capacity planning, oversubscription strategy and headroom for failure or maintenance
• own virtual networking within the fabric and its clean handoff into the Kubernetes CNI layer
• design, build and maintain the full lifecycle of on-prem Kubernetes clusters (bootstrapping, version upgrades, node scaling, decommissioning) using tooling such as kubeadm, Cluster API or Kubespray
• manage the control plane end to end, including etcd operations, backup/restore, performance tuning and disaster recovery
• configure CNI, network policy enforcement and on-prem load balancing
• stand up ingress and internal DNS
• own persistent storage integration via CSI drivers
• define and enforce multi-tenancy patterns across both layers
• build GitOps-based delivery with ArgoCD or Flux
• harden hosts and clusters against CIS benchmarks
• manage secrets
• build observability across the full stack from hypervisor health to cluster metrics and logs
• plan and execute upgrades with minimal workload disruption
• troubleshoot incidents from a misbehaving pod down through kubelet, the container runtime and CNI into the underlying VM and hypervisor
• share an on-call rotation for platform-level incidents
• partner with application teams on developer experience
• coordinate with datacentre and network teams on physical host provisioning

• Solid production experience running Kubernetes in a self-managed, on-premises context (not just EKS/GKE/AKS) — you understand what breaks when there's no managed control plane, and you've operated etcd and the control plane yourself
• Hands-on experience designing and operating a Linux KVM/libvirt-based VM fabric as the foundation for Kubernetes, ideally from a relatively early stage rather than just inheriting a mature environment
• Strong Linux systems administration background: networking, storage, service management, kernel tuning and troubleshooting under pressure
• Practical, in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes networking (CNI internals; service meshes a plus) and storage (CSI drivers, distributed storage systems such as Ceph/Longhorn)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, Packer), GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines
• Comfortable with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/Loki) and using them to diagnose infrastructure issues without cloud-native tooling
• Security-conscious: familiar with hardening standards, RBAC, network segmentation and secrets management
• Strong troubleshooting instincts across the full stack — hypervisor, OS, network, container runtime, Kubernetes control plane — and good written and verbal communication with distributed or hybrid teams
• Будет плюсом: Bare-metal Kubernetes provisioning; a background in a regulated or air-gapped/restricted-network environment; Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling; Using AI tooling to accelerate development; experience running AI infrastructure

• Условий в вакансии нет