zanskar research
Website:
zanskar.xyz
Job details:
About the Role
We're looking for a Senior Network Engineer to own the design, build, and operation of our trading network and server estate. You'll be accountable for end-to-end latency across colocation sites, exchange connectivity, and internal fabric - measured in nanoseconds, not milliseconds. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the intersection of networking, systems engineering, and trading infrastructure.
What You'll Do
- Architect, deploy, and tune low-latency switching fabric (Arista 7130/7150, Exablaze, Cisco Nexus) and exchange cross-connects
- Manage exchange and market-data connectivity: multicast feeds, A/B feed arbitration, order entry sessions, and colo cage buildouts
- Build and tune trading servers end to end - BIOS/UEFI settings, C-states, P-states, turbo, hyperthreading, NUMA topology, and PCIe lane placement
- Own Linux kernel tuning: IRQ affinity, CPU isolation and shielding, hugepages, scheduler and NIC driver tuning, and kernel bypass (Solarflare Onload, Exanic, DPDK)
- Automate server provisioning, configuration, and deployment across colo sites - no snowflake boxes, everything reproducible from code
- Own the monitoring and observability stack for network, servers, and latency telemetry, including alerting and on-call escalation
- Deploy and maintain precision timing infrastructure: PTP/White Rabbit, GPS grandmasters, hardware timestamping
- Build latency measurement pipelines - tap aggregation, packet capture, and correlation of wire-to-wire and tick-to-trade metrics
- Lead capacity planning, vendor and carrier management, and new venue onboarding
- Mentor and grow a small team of network and systems engineers; set standards and run change control for production trading systems
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years in network/systems engineering, including 3+ years in HFT, prop trading, market making, or a comparable ultra-low-latency environment
- Deep hands-on expertise with low-latency switching, multicast, BGP/OSPF, and exchange connectivity
- Strong Linux internals knowledge - kernel tuning, performance profiling, and troubleshooting under production load
- Demonstrated experience with server-level hardware and firmware optimization for latency
- Configuration management and deployment at scale: Ansible and Puppet (or Salt/Chef), PXE/kickstart provisioning, golden image and firmware lifecycle management, Git-based change workflows, and CI-driven rollout
- Monitoring and observability experience with Prometheus and Grafana, plus practical exposure to several of: Zabbix, Nagios/Icinga, Telegraf/InfluxDB, Netdata, collected, ELK/Loki, SNMP-based network monitoring, LibreNMS, and Corvil/Beeks or equivalent latency monitoring platforms - must be able to build dashboards and alerting from scratch, not just consume them
- Comfort with packet capture and analysis tools (tcpdump, Wireshark, hardware-timestamped capture)
- A track record operating production systems where downtime has direct financial impact
Nice to Have
- Python (or C/C++, Go) for automation, telemetry pipelines, and latency analysis tooling
- FPGA/SmartNIC exposure (Xilinx, Napatech, Arista MetaWatch)
- Terraform, containerization, and infrastructure-as-code beyond config management
- Familiarity with venue-specific protocols (FIX, ITCH/OUCH, exchange-native binary APIs)
Click on Apply to know more.
