Lead Compute Engineer

Autonomai Recruitment; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Autonomai Recruitment partners with a global investment firm to hire a Compute Engineering Lead to shape and scale its on-premises compute platform, supporting demanding research and investment workloads.

This senior role is hands-on with ownership across architecture, delivery, and standards. You will lead the compute infrastructure team, work with researchers and developers, translate requirements into reliable, high-performance infrastructure, and participate in on-call.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience engineering large-scale compute environments.
• 5+ years of people management experience and team development.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise across infrastructure and workloads.
• Experience operating bare-metal Linux at scale (RPM-based distros).
• Strong IP networking knowledge and performance tuning.
• Proficient in Python for tooling and automation.
• Experience designing resilient infra and disaster recovery plans.
• Ability to communicate with researchers, developers, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and delivery of large-scale compute infrastructure.
• Lead and develop the engineering team while remaining hands-on.
• Build and strengthen Kubernetes infrastructure for performance, scalability and resilience.
• Partner with research and application teams to maximize platform use.
• Establish DR, BC, and participate in on-call and maintenance.

Skills

Leadership

Python scripting

Linux performance tuning

Kubernetes

Networking

On-prem infrastructure

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Compute Engineering Lead | Global Investment Firm

We’re partnering with a global investment firm to hire a Compute Engineering Lead to shape and scale its on-premises compute platform, supporting demanding research and investment workloads.

This is a senior, hands‑on leadership opportunity with ownership across architecture, engineering delivery and operational standards. You’ll lead the compute infrastructure team, stay close to the technology and work directly with researchers, investment teams and developers to translate business requirements into reliable, high-performance infrastructure.

The role

• Own the technical direction and delivery of large-scale, bare-metal Linux compute infrastructure.
• Lead and develop an engineering team while remaining hands‑on with design, troubleshooting and implementation.
• Build and strengthen Kubernetes infrastructure, improving performance, scalability and resilience.
• Partner with research and application teams to help them make effective use of the platform.
• Establish disaster recovery, business continuity and operational practices, including participation in on‑call and planned maintenance.

What we’re looking for

• 10+ years of hands‑on experience engineering large-scale compute environments.
• 5+ years of people management experience, with a track record of developing strong engineers.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise across the underlying infrastructure and the workloads running on it.
• Experience operating bare‑metal Linux at scale, ideally with RPM-based distributions.
• Strong IP networking knowledge, including routing and performance tuning.
• Experience supporting latency‑sensitive software environments.
• Confidence writing Python for tooling and automation.
• Experience designing resilient infrastructure and disaster recovery plans.

You’ll suit this role if you enjoy combining technical depth with team leadership, taking ownership of complex infrastructure and communicating clearly with both engineers and business stakeholders.