Lead HPC & Compute Systems Architect

Autonomai Recruitment; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Autonomai Recruitment is assisting a leading quantitative trading firm in Chicago to hire a Senior HPC and Compute Engineering Lead. This is a hands-on leadership role shaping the architecture of a large-scale research infrastructure used for demanding ML and data workloads.

You will own design decisions, evaluate new technologies, and drive major engineering initiatives across compute, storage, and orchestration. Collaboration with researchers, traders, and tech leaders is essential for success.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in HPC, large-scale compute, or demanding systems environments.
• Proven track record architecting and delivering infrastructure at scale.
• Deep Linux knowledge and strong performance understanding.
• Ability to operate strategically while remaining technically hands-on.
• Experience leading engineering teams, programs, or architectural initiatives.
• Strong communication to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture and technical direction of large-scale HPC platforms.
• Design and scale bare-metal Linux infrastructure.
• Build platforms for quantitative research, ML, and compute workloads.
• Evaluate processors, GPUs, storage, networking, and orchestration tools.
• Optimise performance, capacity, resilience, and observability.
• Establish architectural standards and best practices.
• Lead major infrastructure projects from design to production deployment.
• Collaborate with researchers and developers to improve resource access.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring across the org.
• Contribute to disaster recovery, business continuity, and capacity planning.

Skills

Linux

Kubernetes on bare metal

Slurm

Docker

HPC infrastructure

Performance tuning

Python

Go

C++

Infrastructure automation

Tools

VAST

DDN

Isilon

Lustre

GPFS

Weka

Networking gear

Job description

Autonomai Recruitment is assisting a leading quantitative trading firm in Chicago to hire a Senior HPC and Compute Engineering Lead. This is a hands-on leadership role shaping the architecture of a large-scale research infrastructure used for demanding ML and data workloads.

You will own design decisions, evaluate new technologies, and drive major engineering initiatives across compute, storage, and orchestration. Collaboration with researchers, traders, and tech leaders is essential for success.