Infrastructure Engineer

Infrastructure Engineer - Platform Team

Location: Washington, DC (hybrid; 3 days in office per week)

About Alphataraxia

Alphataraxia Management (ATX) is a fast-growing quantitative investment management group with offices in both Washington, DC and Culver City, Los Angeles, CA. We specialize in wholesale electricity markets, where extreme volatility is the norm and the marketplace is constantly evolving, presenting new opportunities for growth and insight. We are currently one of the top participants in the power markets and are looking for hard-working candidates with genuine enthusiasm for solving complex problems to join our collaborative and high-caliber team.

The role

Platform’s work focuses on three core responsibilities:

• Providing a scalable, reliable foundation for the firm’s most critical data and tools.
• Accelerating and scaling valuable prototypes into robust production solutions.
• Rapidly resolving technical barriers that slow teams down.

This role owns the Infrastructure area of responsibility within the Platform Team: AWS foundation and networking, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps, the Dagster control plane, Snowflake infrastructure, security, identity and secrets, disaster recovery, cost and capacity planning, and remote access. You'll be the one person principally focused in this area, with the rest of Platform (four engineers focused mostly on the Data and Developer Platform) helping you ramp.

Reports to:  Head of Platform

What you'll do

For the first several months, the Head of Platform will collaboratively set priorities with you while you learn the systems and the firm. After that, you own the roadmap for Infrastructure the way a product owner would - you bring them problems and a prioritized plan before starting execution. There's already a backlog of possible projects (tenant-level reliability of Snowflake, access hardening for AI enablement, resilience to GitHub outages, EKS upgrade cadence, a capacity planning process); part of the job is deciding which ones actually matter and when.

Some IT-adjacent work falls under Infrastructure too, mainly access provisioning and security. IT is a small share of the team's time overall, so expect it to be a very minor part of the role.

How we work

The Platform Team works together with the three other functions of the firm: Market Teams, Investment Engineering, and the Internal Team. Market teams analyze the power markets and build our bids based on our internal data and tooling, all built on Platform Team infrastructure. The Investment Engineering (IE) Team is scales investment prototypes and builds proprietary modeling tools - when IE needs to scale a system, they often hit a systems barrier that the Platform Team is best placed to remove. Our Internal Team uses applications and tools built by the Platform Team to scale their work and deliver greater leverage to the firm with fewer people.

Working with these teams, this role will build and execute the Infrastructure roadmap based on touchpoints with stakeholders across the firm, feedback from office hours, and anticipation of future scaling needs. Working with the rest of the Platform Team, this role will prioritize and synthesize the next steps of these projects, recommend approaches, and execute on the core technical work.

You'll join a five-person on-call rotation with the rest of the Platform Team. In practice, we see only a handful of outside-of-work-hours pages a year. The bulk of on-call is non-urgent - something failed overnight and you deal with it when you get in - and most of that is currently data-pipeline work, since we're currently working to modernize our data ingestion and transformation processes firm-wide. Some things are time-sensitive because of the nature of our markets (bid deadlines don't move). The rotation may change shape as our maintenance surface grows and the team becomes more specialized.

What we're looking for

The core requirement is ownership. We view the Infrastructure vertical as a product with a roadmap, and the person in this seat will be the one to drive it full-time. That expectation starts small and grows, but this is not a role with a well defined queue of tickets pre-scoped for execution.

Your users are internal. They're technical but they aren't infrastructure experts, so they will need to understand the rationale for any changes and improvements we’re making to our infrastructure. The people who will succeed here treats other engineers as customers while advocating for improvements to our infrastructure. They automate recurring work, maintain a high bar for reliability and security, and prioritize projects based on the needs of the firm. They'd rather ship the simple solution a 50-person firm needs than build for scale we don't have. They surface tradeoffs in their work, rather than sharing a solution absent the context that resulted in that recommendation.

Prior skills and experiences that matter for this role include designing, implementing, and maintaining the following services:

• Production Kubernetes (like EKS) and Terraform
• GitOps workflows (like Flux, Atlantis)
• Docker, deeply enough to debug a container problem down through the OS and network layers
• Cloud networking, secrets, certificates, and secure service-to-service connectivity
• Self-service tooling for other engineers

Nice to have:

• Workflow orchestration infrastructure
• Snowflake and RDS infrastructure
• Karpenter
• Python
• Multi-region or multi-provider disaster recovery design
• Managing externally-issued credentials and certificates

Benefits & Perks

We strive to offer best-in-class compensation and benefits alongside an unrivaled work-life balance.

• $180,000-$200,000 annual salary
• Annual discretionary bonus/ signing bonus
• 18 paid vacation days + 7 paid federal holidays
• Excellent health, dental, and vision insurance (including HSA option) with no monthly premiums for best-in-class platinum individual plan
• 401k match -- 100% company matching on the first 4% of deferrals with immediate vesting
• Annual firmwide weeklong summit
• Hybrid remote work environment -- most of the year we are in the office Tuesday to Thursday with remote flexibility Monday and Friday
• Flexible remote work months -- fully remote option for the month of July and between Thanksgiving and New Years
• Casual environment (informal attire)
• Snacks and unlimited coffee in the office
• Firm-sponsored social events and activities including happy hours, lunches, book club, and more!

Application:

Please note that we can only extend offers to individuals that are authorized to work in the US; we are unable to sponsor visa applications at this time.

Alphataraxia's privacy notice is available here: https://www.alphataraxia.com/privacy-notice