DevOps Production Engineer

About Clear Street

Clear Street is modernizing the brokerage ecosystem. Founded in 2018, Clear Street is a diversified financial services firm replacing the legacy infrastructure used across capital markets.

We started from scratch by building a completely cloud-native clearing and custody system designed for today's complex, global market. Our platform is fully integrated with central clearing houses and exchanges to support billions in trading volume per day. We've agonized about our data model abstractions, created horizontal scalability, and crafted thoughtful APIs. All so we can provide a best-in-class experience for our clients.

By combining highly-skilled product and engineering talent with seasoned finance professionals, we're building the essentials to compete in today's fast-paced markets.

The Team

Production Engineering is responsible for the daily operation of Clear Street's trading systems - a set of distributed network applications running on Linux hosts, integrated with liquidity venues, clearing houses, and exchanges that support billions in trading volume per day. We use a mix of open-source and proprietary software to provide low-latency direct market access across asset classes. The team's work centers on three areas: monitoring and alerting (Grafana, Wireshark), deployment and testing (Ansible, pytest), and system optimization (C++, hardware testing).

The Role

• Own the daily operation of production trading systems: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and troubleshooting across Linux hosts and network infrastructure.
• Build and extend our monitoring and alerting stack (Grafana, Wireshark) and our deployment and testing tooling (Ansible, pytest), treating infrastructure as code and servers as cattle, not pets.
• Optimize system performance at the software and hardware level - latency, throughput, and jitter - including work in C++ and hands-on hardware testing.
• Interface with the many external venue and counterparty systems our platform connects to; notice failure patterns and propose upgrades that make the whole system more resilient.
• Weigh risk and reward in real time on decisions that affect live trading, and help traders and other non-technical users navigate those choices.

What We Value

• Technical curiosity: a relentless drive to understand how things work under the hood - not satisfied with "it works," you want to know why.
• Attention to detail: in trading, accuracy is paramount; you take pride in reliable code and graceful handling of edge cases.
• Tactical judgment: the ability to make thoughtful risk/reward trade-offs, with incomplete information, on decisions that impact the bottom line of a live trading business.
• High ownership and accountability, strong collaboration across engineering, trading, and operations, and satisfaction in work with a direct, measurable impact.

Requirements

• 1-3 years of professional experience in production engineering, site reliability engineering, systems administration, or a related field.
• Linux native: comfortable with file and process management, system troubleshooting, debugging, configuration, and networking.
• Strong command of Python for backend development - clean, efficient, Pythonic code.
• A GitOps mindset: you understand the value of treating infrastructure as code.
• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with C++ - our high-performance trading engines run on it, and the ability to read and interface with that codebase is valuable.
• High-performance networking experience: achieving low deterministic latency and high throughput with minimal jitter (kernel bypass, hardware timestamping, multicast, cut-through switches).

We Offer

• The opportunity to join a small and growing team of good people, where you can make a difference.
• A modern, cloud-native platform with little technical debt and room to build new services and features.
• A meritocratic philosophy that champions collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and perks.

The Base Salary Range for this role is $150,000 - $200,000. This range is representative of the starting base salaries for this role at Clear Street. Where a candidate falls in this range will be based on job related factors such as relevant experience, skills, and location. This range represents Base Salary only, which is just one element of Clear Street's total compensation. The range stated does not include other factors of total compensation such as bonuses or equity.

At Clear Street, we offer competitive compensation packages, company equity, 401k matching, gender neutral parental leave, and full medical, dental and vision insurance. This role is based in our New York office four days per week; in-office benefits include lunch stipends, fully stocked kitchens, happy hours, a great location, and amazing views.

Our top priority is our people. We're continuously investing in a culture that promotes collaboration. We help each other through challenges and celebrate each other's successes. We believe that modern workplaces succeed by virtue of having high-performance workforces that are diverse - in ideas, in cultures, and in experiences. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and put in the effort to make such a workplace a daily reality.