Trading Systems Engineers

Location: Amsterdam

Department: IT

About the role

Trading Systems runs the infrastructure Flow Traders trades on: the global Linux fleet — trading servers, workstations and VDIs — and the multi-cloud and distributed-systems estate that sits alongside it. We also build and run the self-service infrastructure platform the rest of Technology depends on.

We are hiring two engineers into this team. This is a hands-on engineering role: most of your time goes on writing Terraform, building CI workflows and guardrails, automating toil out of the Linux fleet, and operating what you build. A lot of the shared tooling does not exist yet, and building it is the job rather than a side effect of it. The environment is trading-critical and runs across both on-premise infrastructure and public cloud, and you will work on both sides of that line rather than specialising in one.

To be clear about the shape of the seat: this is build-and-operate rather than architecture, strategy or management. There is architecture in it, but the bulk of the work is hands-on and there are no direct reports. A solid Linux foundation is essential across the whole role — it underpins both sides of the estate, and the cloud, container and Kubernetes work rests on it just as much as the on-premise fleet does.

What you will do

• Write, debug and publish reusable Terraform modules that other engineers consume, covering both the Linux fleet and the cloud estate.
• Design and own CI/CD workflows and guardrails in GitHub Actions — the policy checks, tests and approval gates that let engineers across Technology self-serve infrastructure safely.
• Build and operate Kubernetes on both sides of the estate — managed clusters in cloud and k3s on-premise — along with the distributed systems running on it, particularly Kafka.
• Provision and operate GCP, AWS and Alibaba Cloud resources through Infrastructure as Code.
• Operate and automate the Linux estate: Foreman provisioning across VMs and bare metal, Puppet for host configuration, Ansible/AWX for application deployment, plus patching and lifecycle.
• Build automation and internal tooling in Python or Go, with test-driven development as a normal working habit.
• Take a share of the global 24/7 on-call rotation, and cross-skill deliberately between the Linux and cloud sides of the estate.

What you will need to succeed

• Strong Terraform experience, including writing, debugging and producing reusable modules for others to consume.
• CI/CD experience, ideally GitHub Actions — and the guardrails, not only the pipelines. We want to hear about the gates and policy checks you built and why each one exists. Equivalent GitLab CI or Jenkins experience is fine.
• Solid Kubernetes in production across workloads, CNI, Helm and Argo. Self-managed or bare-metal clusters are a strong plus, as is contributing to or authoring operators.
• Hands-on experience provisioning and operating GCP or AWS through Infrastructure as Code, with an appetite to go deeper.
• Strong Linux fundamentals — you can debug a production host without a runbook: processes, networking, storage, systemd, logs, kernel versus user space.
• Proficiency in Python or Go, with demonstrable experience of test-driven development.
• Direct experience of production on-call and incident response, and a considered view on what makes a rotation sustainable.
• Typically 5+ years in infrastructure, platform or systems engineering. Fluent written and spoken English. Based in the Amsterdam area or willing to relocate — this role is on-site and is not remote.

Nice to have

• A genuine cross-domain background — both Linux/systems and cloud/platform, rather than one of them plus a passing acquaintance with the other.
• GCP specifically, as our primary cloud.
• Kafka in production. Real Kafka depth would be a significant win for us.
• Our fleet tooling: Puppet for host configuration management at scale, Ansible and AWX, and Foreman.
• Bare-metal and datacenter infrastructure — provisioning, hardware lifecycle, virtualization (VMware, Proxmox) — and networking depth across routing, load balancing, BGP and multicast.
• Financial services, trading, or another high-availability, latency-sensitive environment. Dutch is useful but not required.