Trading Network Performance & Fairness Engineer (f/m/d)

Your area of work:

The Network Engineering team at Deutsche Börse Group is a globally distributed unit responsible for the architecture, implementation, and operation of mission-critical trading networks, delivering highly reliable, low-latency trading data services to a global clientele from our locations in Frankfurt and Prague.

As a Network Performance & Fairness Engineer, you will evaluate, validate, and benchmark network and trading infrastructure technologies used in Deutsche Börse's electronic trading environments.

Working closely with internal engineering teams, application owners, and technology vendors, you will provide independent technical assessments to ensure that Deutsche Börse continues to operate a highly performant, reliable, and fair trading infrastructure.

Your responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain a dedicated laboratory environment for network and infrastructure testing.
• Develop and execute automated, repeatable test methodologies to measure latency, fairness, resilience, and performance of network devices and connectivity solutions.
• Validate network device behavior, including forwarding performance, buffering characteristics, and deterministic operation.
• Evaluate and compare technologies from multiple vendors through objective testing and analysis.
• Build Python-based automation frameworks and analyze large data sets generated by test scenarios.
• Perform packet-level investigations and root-cause analysis of performance-related issues.
• Produce clear technical reports and management summaries, and contribute to network design discussions with data-driven recommendations.

Your profile:

• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals, including the OSI model, switching, routing, TCP/IP, and common protocols (TCP, UDP, BGP, multicast).
• Strong grasp of latency concepts (propagation delay, serialization delay, queuing delay, jitter) and physical layer technologies.
• Strong Python skills for test automation, data collection, statistical analysis, and visualization (e.g., Pandas, NumPy, Plotly).
• Experience creating and executing structured test plans, with the ability to perform precise measurements and interpret results.
• Proficiency in Linux environments and familiarity with Git and software development workflows.
• Strong analytical mindset with a structured, methodical approach to problem-solving and a high attention to detail.
• Excellent documentation and communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, operations, and vendor teams.

Nice to have:

• Experience in electronic trading, exchange, or financial market infrastructure environments.
• Knowledge of hardware timestamping, FPGA-based networking, or precision timing technologies such as PTP, SyncE, or White Rabbit.
• Familiarity with traffic generation and testing platforms such as Spirent or Ixia, and tools such as Wireshark for packet capture analysis.
• Experience with network automation frameworks (Ansible, Nornir, Netmiko, or NAPALM) and CI/CD concepts.
• Exposure to network telemetry technologies such as gNMI, OpenConfig, or streaming telemetry.