Systems Administrator

Position: Systems Administrator
Company: Optimal Market Technologies, LLC
Location: Chicago or NYC, hybrid
Salary: $140,000 - $200,000 base salary + discretionary bonus (commensurate with experience)

Position Overview:

We are seeking a hands-on Systems Administrator, working alongside our existing sysadmin, to keep our production infrastructure running and to grow it. You and your colleague own the infrastructure layer: hosts, network, storage, and connectivity, with some services supported by external providers. Application-level production support and incident coordination sit with our senior Production Engineer. You will build and operate what you put in place, automate routine work, and help us move from individual knowledge to reliable, documented systems.

Our environment:

We run an automated trading system with single-digit-millisecond latency requirements on bare-metal Linux. We use cloud for storage and are investigating wider use. We currently use Nagios and Ansible; our applications are written in C++, Python and SQL. We are actively modernizing, upgrading technologies (e.g. CentOS7 to RHEL9), and have legacy and new systems running in parallel. You will deliver a stream of technology changes.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Own the Linux and network estate across colocation and cloud: deployment, capacity, and failover.
• Automate routine work through Infrastructure as Code.
• Own infrastructure security: hardening, access control, recoverable backups, and security incident response.
• Diagnose and resolve infrastructure issues in production. Take part in incident response and the on-call rotation.
• Own end-to-end connectivity monitoring, from client servers through our systems to the exchanges, and identify where and why it fails.
• Track what breaks in production and why and turn repeat firefighting into automation that prevents it.
• Own recovery runbooks and drills and run the technical side of post-incident review.
• Partner with the development team on deployments, performance tracking and capacity planning.
• On-call coverage is market hours plus a support rotation.

What We're Looking For:

• Strong hands-on Linux and network administration.
• Strong scripting and automation skills.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (we are open on which tools).
• A track record in production support and incident response.
• Experience using AI tools, ideally Claude Code.
• Ownership: you take responsibility for what you run and communicate status without being asked.
• Clear communication and the ability to work well in a small team.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience at a start-up.
• Experience in real-time critical systems.
• Experience in an order-management or exchange-connected financial business.
• Python
• Cloud services, ideally Azure including AVD.