Infrastructure Engineer

Barak Capital; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Breakfast and daily meal allowance

Fresh coffee

Gym access

Travel reimbursement

Lease-a-Bike program

Job summary

Barak Capital is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Engineer to own the bare-metal Linux stack for ultra-low latency trading workloads in Amsterdam. You will drive kernel tuning, PCI/BIOS settings, and network stack optimizations, while building observability and CI/CD pipelines for repeatable deployments on physical hosts.

You should have 4+ years in Linux infrastructure or performance engineering, with hands-on experience in kernel-bypass networking, time synchronization, and performance

Qualifications

• 4+ years in Linux infrastructure, SRE, or performance engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own and optimize bare-metal Linux infrastructure end-to-end, from BIOS to app-level performance.
• Implement and maintain precision time synchronization (PTP/PPS) at scale.
• Configure and tune kernel-bypass networking for ultra-low-latency market data and order paths.
• Profile and eliminate latency across hardware, OS, and network layers.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code for on-prem deployments.
• Collaborate with quantitative developers and trading teams to co-design infrastructure.

Skills

Linux

SRE

Performance engineering

Kernel tuning

Latency optimization

Python

Bash

Tools

Onload/DPDK

ef_vi

Perf

ftrace

eBPF

bpftrace

cyclictest

Job description

We're looking for an Infrastructure Engineer who thrives on squeezing every microsecond out of a system. You'll own the performance, reliability, and automation of our bare-metal trading infrastructure in an environment where latency is measured in nanoseconds, and every kernel tuning decision matters. If you're the kind of engineer who reads kernel changelogs for fun and has opinions about NIC ring buffer sizes, we'd love to talk!

Job Description:

• Own and optimize our bare-metal Linux infrastructure end-to-end — from BIOS/firmware settings through
• kernel tuning to application-level performance.
• Implement and maintain precision time synchronization (PTP/PPS) across the trading environment, ensuring
• Configure and tune kernel-bypass networking (Onload / OpenOnload, DPDK, or similar) for ultra-low-latency
• market data and order paths.
• Profile and eliminate latency at every layer: hardware interrupts, CPU isolation and pinning, NUMA topology,
• memory allocation, network stack.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code for repeatable, auditable deployments across
• physical hosts.
• Develop monitoring and observability tooling focused on latency distribution, jitter, and tail-latency anomalies
• — not just uptime.
• Collaborate with quantitative developers and trading teams to understand workload characteristics and codesign infrastructure around them.
• Manage network infrastructure including switch configuration, multicast, and colocation connectivity where
• applicable.

The Right Candidate

• 4+ years in a Linux infrastructure, SRE, or performance engineering role — experience in an HFT or electronic
• trading firm is strongly preferred.
• Deep Linux systems knowledge: kernel tuning (sysctl, cgroups, isolcpus, tickless kernels), scheduling policies,
• memory management, and storage I/O.
• Hands-on experience with kernel-bypass networking — Solarflare/Xilinx Onload, ef_vi, DPDK, or similar
• frameworks.
• Solid understanding of PTP (IEEE 1588), PPS, and time synchronization architecture at scale.
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python) and experience with configuration management tools
• (Ansible, Salt, or similar).
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar) in a bare-metal or on-prem context.
• Comfort working with hardware: server selection, NIC selection and firmware, BIOS tuning, and colocation
• Familiarity with performance profiling tools: perf, ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF/bpftrace, cyclictest.

Bonus:

• Experience with FPGA-based networking or hardware timestamping.
• Knowledge of market data protocols (ITCH, OUCH, FIX) or exchange connectivity.
• Familiarity with InfiniBand or RoCE fabrics.
• Experience with compliance and security standards relevant to financial environments (ISO 27001, SOC 2).
• Exposure to container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) for non-latency-critical workloads and tooling

What We Offer:

• Freedom to drive improvements and directly shape our low-latency infrastructure
• Full HSM visa support and 30% ruling support (if applicable)Breakfast, fresh coffee, and daily meal allowance in our office in Amsterdam Zuid
• Access to gym facilities, travel reimbursement, or Lease-a-Bike program
• International environment and regular team events

Please note: This position is open only to candidates currently located in the Netherlands.