Lead Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

About the role

Teza is a systematic trading firm developing quantitative strategies across multiple asset classes. We are looking for a Lead Infrastructure Engineer to own the platform that supports our traders, quants, and developers. This includes colocation hardware near the exchanges, research compute and developer services, and the security and release processes that connect these environments.

This is a player-coach role. You will lead the infrastructure team, which includes DevOps Engineers and Infrastructure Engineers, and set its technical direction while remaining hands-on. You will provision and tune bare-metal trading servers, respond to production incidents, and review the designs and solutions your team delivers.

We are not looking for a manager who delegates all technical work or an engineer who avoids leading people. We need someone who can do both and determine where their time and attention are most needed.

Our platform supports active trading and research today, and we are investing in making it more robust, observable, secure, and developer-friendly. You will have significant ownership and decision-making over infrastructure tooling, standards, and priorities across the firm.

Location: Austin, Texas (On-Site)

What You'll Own:

- Trading Infrastructure and Colocation. Oversee server procurement and lifecycle management across multiple exchange colocations. Select low-latency NICs, such as Solarflare, Exanic, and Mellanox, and kernel-bypass technologies. Develop and maintain Linux tuning standards for trading hosts, including CPU isolation, NUMA-aware pinning, IRQ affinity, and BIOS and kernel settings. Manage hardware failures, spare capacity, and capacity planning.

- Research and Developer Platform. Oversee compute orchestration for researchers and data engineers, including Slurm for HPC, machine learning, and GPU workloads; Hadoop for batch processing; and Airflow for workflow scheduling. Support shared services such as JupyterHub, databases, artifact storage, and large-dataset storage. Determine when Kubernetes is appropriate and when alternative approaches are better suited.

- Security. Establish and maintain access controls for production trading hosts in colocation. Manage network segmentation across colocation, corporate, and research environments. Oversee secrets management for exchange credentials, API keys, and certificates, including rotation, auditing, and deployment integration. Lead vulnerability management, patching for systems that cannot be routinely rebooted, intrusion detection, and incident response.

- Releases and Deployment. Define how trading strategies, data pipelines, and real-time trading systems move from development into production. Establish rollback procedures and release processes for infrastructure changes, including kernels, firmware, and NIC drivers. Oversee infrastructure-as-code pipelines and coordinate releases with the trading calendar.

- Operational Maturity. Establish the on-call model and escalation paths. Improve observability across internal services through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting. Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems, ensuring action items are tracked and completed.