Infrastructure Engineer / Linux Performance Engineer

DUDOK; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Barak Capital Market Making in Amsterdam seeks an Infrastructure Engineer who thrives on squeezing every microsecond out of a system. You will own the performance, reliability, and automation of our bare-metal trading infrastructure from BIOS to application level.

You will implement precision time synchronization (PTP/PPS), kernel-bypass networking, and observability tooling to profile latency and tail-latency.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in a Linux infrastructure, SRE, or performance engineering role.
• Deep Linux knowledge: kernel tuning, scheduling, memory management and I/O.
• Hands-on with kernel-bypass networking tools and frameworks.
• Experience with time synchronization at scale (PTP/PPS).
• Scripting and automation in Bash/Python; configuration management tools.
• CI/CD tooling experience in bare-metal or on-prem contexts.
• Comfort with hardware settings and colocation environments.
• Familiarity with perf, ftrace, flamegraphs, eBPF/bpftrace, cyclictest.

Responsibilities

• Own and optimize bare-metal Linux infrastructure end-to-end from BIOS to app-level performance.
• Implement and maintain precision time synchronization across the trading environment.
• Configure and tune kernel-bypass networking for ultra-low-latency paths.
• Profile latency at all layers and optimize interrupts, NUMA, and memory usage.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and IaC for repeatable deployments.
• Develop monitoring focused on latency distribution, jitter, and tail latency.
• Collaborate with quantitative developers and trading teams to co-design infrastructure.
• Manage network infrastructure including switch configuration and colocation connectivity.

Skills

Linux performance

SRE practices

Scripting (Bash/Python)

CI/CD practices

Tools

Onload/DPDK

Perf/Flamegraphs/eBPF

Jenkins/GitLab CI

Ansible/Salt

Kubernetes

Docker

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
  nanosecond-level accuracy.
• 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
  environments.
• 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

About the workplace

Barak Capital Market Making is a technology-driven proprietary trading firm and an official market maker on major exchanges worldwide. Our Amsterdam office, established in 2021, is a new venture to expand our trading knowledge across Europe. We are a team of ambitious traders, researchers, and developers who believe that the fusion of mathematics, technology and people is the key to creating efficient, fair, and transparent markets. At Barak, we don't just follow market trends – we use data-driven predications to stay ahead of them.

Scope of employment

Form of employment: Temporary employment