Head of Infrastructure

Description:

As Head of Infrastructure, you will lead the design, implementation, and optimisation of global infrastructure stack to support high-frequency trading, quantitative modeling, and real-time data analytics. This is a strategic, hands-on role in a scale-up environment, where you'll own everything from Azure cloud architecture to on-prem colocation setups, ensuring zero-downtime operations for our 24/7 trading desks. You will also manage the global trading desktop support function, directly facing off to traders across regions. You'll manage a growing team of engineers, collaborate with quants and traders, and drive innovations in low-latency systems, leveraging tools like InfluxDB (Flux) for monitoring and Azure for scalable compute. With aggressive growth, this position offers direct impact on firm-wide performance and a path to broader tech leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end infrastructure strategy, including Azure cloud (VMs, AKS, Storage, Networking), with AWS as a nice-to-have for future multi-cloud strategy, hybrid setups, and colocation in key data centers (e.g., Equinix, NYSE).
• Design and maintain ultra-low-latency environments for systematic market making, optimizing networking (e.g., Arista/Cisco switches, FPGA-accelerated routing) and compute (GPUs for ML models, high-performance storage).
• Oversee monitoring and observability using InfluxDB (Flux queries for time-series metrics), Prometheus, Grafana, and Azure Monitor to ensure sub-millisecond response times and proactive issue resolution.
• Manage global 24/7 operations: Implement high-availability architectures, disaster recovery (Azure Site Recovery), and automated scaling for peak trading volumes.
• Build and mentor a high-performing infrastructure and trading desktop support team, fostering a DevOps culture with IaC (Terraform, ARM templates) and CI/CD pipelines, while maintaining direct operational accountability to trading desks.
• Collaborate with trading, quant, and procurement teams to translate business needs into resilient systems, e.g., integrating real-time data feeds (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, ICE) with minimal latency.
• Drive cost optimization in Azure (reserved instances, FinOps practices) while balancing performance; target 99.999% uptime and 15-20% efficiency gains annually.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory standards (e.g., FCA, CFTC) through secure configurations, encryption, and audit-ready logging.
• Lead vendor relationships for hardware/software (e.g., Dell/HPE servers, Azure partnerships) and evaluate emerging tech like edge computing for distributed trading.
• Contribute to budget planning, capacity forecasting, and quarterly OKRs for infrastructure reliability and innovation.

What They’re Looking For

• 10+ years in infrastructure engineering/leadership, with 5+ in financial services (prop trading, hedge funds, or investment banks preferred).
• Proven expertise in Azure cloud architecture (certifications like AZ-305 or equivalent); hands-on with AKS, Virtual Networks, and Azure DevOps; AWS experience is a plus.
• Deep experience in low-latency trading systems: Networking optimizations, colocation management, and hardware for HFT/market making.
• Proficiency with time-series databases like InfluxDB (Flux scripting for queries and tasks), and monitoring stacks (ELK, Prometheus).
• Strong IaC skills (Terraform, Ansible) and container orchestration (Kubernetes on Azure).
• Track record scaling infrastructure for 24/7 global ops, including DR/BC planning and performance tuning for GPUs/FPGAs.
• Excellent leadership: Built teams in fast-paced environments; comfortable with hands-on execution across cloud, on-prem, physical desktop infrastructure, networking, and administrative tasks when required.
• Bonus: Experience with systematic strategies in commodities, FinOps for cloud cost management, or open-source contributions in infra tools.