Platform Engineer (Hybrid) 2/3 days in Chicago Office

About Maven Maven implements both fundamental and quantitative trading & market making strategies across global financial markets, utilising only the group’s capital. We see ourselves just as much a technology firm as a multi-strat trading firm. We aim to equip our traders with the best tools we can. We channel the advances in computer learning, processing power and network capacity into streamlining and improving all aspects of the trading operation, from front office to settlements. This is paired with meticulous and attentive execution and conservative risk management. If you would like to learn more about working at Maven please visit: https://www.mavensecurities.com/work-at-maven/

Maven

Opening Minds and Markets

Market MakingITDevelopmentAsset Managementand Trading

M

mavensecurities.com

201-500 employees

Financial Services

London, England

2011

Privately Held

47k LinkedIn followers

• This role is based in our Chicago office. You work US hours with the desks here: understand what they are trying to do, turn that into something they can run themselves, and deal with the production problems that cannot wait for London.
• You will work with Platform colleagues in London and Asia, and with the Chicago infrastructure and trading technology teams.
• Sitting with Chicago teams to understand what they are trying to accomplish, including the parts they have not spelled out, and turning that into a requirement the platform team can act on
• Designing better ways of working for those teams: hosted developer environments (Coder), the path from a change to production, templates and checks that make the safe way the easy one
• Recommending how we apply what we already have, and pushing back when a request is the wrong solution
• Following through across the timezone gap so things do not stall when London has gone home
• Being available in US hours when a deployment or application misbehaves, and handling the ones that cannot wait
• Contributing to the shared platform rather than a US-specific fork. One repository, one set of standards
• Working with the Chicago Linux, network and storage teams on anything that spans the hosts and the cluster

Required

• Around six years in a platform, SRE, DevOps or development role. Depth matters more than the exact number.
• Comfortable working with traders, researchers and developers: you can listen to a messy request, find the actual problem, and explain a proposed approach in their terms
• Able to recommend a direction and to say no when the ask is unreasonable or would make things worse
• Persistent follow-up. A lot of this job is unfinished conversations across a six-hour gap.
• Production Kubernetes: you have deployed to it, debugged a broken change, and can deal with an incident without waiting for someone else. You do not need to have run a fleet.
• Comfortable with GitOps. We use ArgoCD, Helm and Kustomize; Terraform or similar experience transfers.
• Able to write code to automate work. We use Python most of the time; Go is also useful.
• Experience building a development or deployment process that other teams then ran themselves.

Preferred

• None of these are required.
• Experience in a trading firm, or another environment where the users of the platform are close to the business. Useful, not required; we have hired well from outside finance.
• Judgment about when to decide locally and when to wait for the rest of the team
• Coder, Gitpod, Codespaces, or another hosted developer environment
• Kubernetes on-premises or on bare metal
• Observability stacks you have operated: Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or similar
• Experience in a new or growing regional team
• Experience using AI-powered tools to improve efficiency and workflows.

• A great engineering environment whereby technology is key to our success.
• The upside of start-up without the associated risks.
• A great, friendly, informal, and highly rewarding culture.
• Informal dress code, loads of free food and social events.
• Fast-growing global firm with plenty of opportunity where you will have significant impact.
• At Maven, our goal is to create an environment that empowers and motivates our employees to maximise their potential. Our comprehensive benefits package is designed to optimise performance, reward our employees, and allow them time to pursue their passions.
• Salary Range: $150000 - $200000, plus a discretionary bonus.