Platform Engineer at PDT Partners

PDT’s quantitative investment business is powered by a world-class technology platform spanning research computing, low-latency trading, application development, and core engineering domains. Researching new ideas, trading them real-time, and supporting systems, are all under the purview of platform engineering teams at PDT.  They are trusted partners tasked with solving real-world technical problems to propel PDT forward. 

We are looking for talented Platform Engineers to join us and work in one of our platform teams. Members of our platform engineering teams are responsible for the design, implementation, and operational support of scalable and performant systems that are critical to our success. Platform teams require excellent technology, problem-solving abilities, curiosity and discipline to carry projects from idea to delivery, and strong communication and collaboration skills. Platform teams can specialize in different domains, including HPC Infrastructure, Container Orchestration, CI/CD, Linux, Cloud, and Network Engineering. 
 
Why join us? 
PDT Partners has a stellar 30+ year track record and a reputation for excellence. Our goal is to be the best quantitative investment manager in the world—measured by the quality of our products, not their size.  PDT’s very high employee-retention and mobility speaks for itself. Our people are intellectually extraordinary, and our community is close-knit, down-to-earth, and diverse.  Our engineers love to work on challenging and complicated problems, and in return, they have a chance to make a direct impact on our bottom line, without the attitude and bureaucracy of a typical Wall Street firm.
 
Responsibilities: Platform teams are small flat groups of experts that help research, implementation, and software engineering teams take their ideas from inception to production. There are many areas of focus that vary by team, but they all share common responsibilities and patterns of work: 

• Design, implement, and deliver scalable and performant systems. Projects typically involve equal parts engineering and operations, for success in our fast-moving environment. You will be expected to do both for projects small and large, working with a mix of open-source and proprietary tools.
• Implementing automation. We will always choose to work smart over working hard. You will be responsible for conception and implementation of new automation from CI/CD pipelines to production metrics to other automation for the platform infrastructure that your team owns.
• Obsessive User Focus. All members of platform teams collaborate closely with peer engineers and/or researchers to build high-quality, efficient, and reliable systems. This includes adapting to change, and at times diving into new domains to deeply understand stakeholder needs.
• Capacity management and benchmark optimization. Our demand for scale and performance is constant and involves challenging optimization problems for workloads critical to research and trading.
• Running our platform systems day-to-day. Our platforms are mission critical for the firm’s success and are very stable, and we want to keep it that way. Everybody on the team contributes to the support of our platforms, which we strive to make light through automation and quality work.

Below is a list of skills and experiences we think are relevant. Even if you don’t think you’re a perfect match, we still encourage you to apply because we are committed to developing our people.

• Experience with systems programming and/or software engineering
• Practical experience supporting, debugging, and improving production systems and services
• Experience using Linux and other Open Source Software
• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code frameworks
• Production experience working with a public cloud, AWS preferred
• Qualified candidates will have at least one area of specialty platform knowledge: HPC, Trading, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Linux, Cloud Infrastructure, or Networking 

Education:  
Bachelors or Masters degree in an Engineering or Applied Sciences field from a rigorous academic program or equivalent professional experience.

The salary range for this role is between $195,000 and $225,000. This range is not inclusive of any potential bonus amounts.  Factors that may impact the agreed upon salary within the range for a particular candidate include years of experience, level of education obtained, skill set, and other external factors.

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