Datacentre Operations Engineer

The Firm

XTX Markets is a leading algorithmic trading firm which uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 53,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, and crypto. It uses those forecasts to trade on exchanges and alternative trading venues, and to offer differentiated liquidity directly to clients worldwide. The firm trades over $250bn a day across 35 countries and has over 300 employees based in London, Singapore, New York, Paris, Bristol, Mumbai, Yerevan and Kajaani.

We leverage the talent of our team, modern computational techniques, and state-of-the-art research infrastructure to analyse large data sets across markets quickly and efficiently, maximizing the effectiveness of our proprietary trading algorithms. We are actively seeking new methods and ideas. The models that drive our trading strategies have evolved considerably over the last 10 years, from econometric methods that gave our company its name, to trees, to neural networks, to modern deep learning architectures.

XTX Markets has an unrivalled level of computational resources in the trading industry, with a growing research cluster currently containing well over 25,000 GPUs with more than 1 exabyte of usable storage. Teams across the firm include world-class researchers, developers and technologists with backgrounds in pure math, programming, physics, computer science and machine learning. The firm is also constructing a large-scale data centre in Finland to future-proof its significant computational capabilities.

At XTX Markets, technology is our business, and we are a diverse organization which attracts outstanding talent from across all industry backgrounds. We are focused on teamwork, and our people collaborate on all aspects of the business, working openly and with respect for each other, our clients and the market. Our culture is non-hierarchical and one where everyone is valued. We strive for excellence in everything we do.

The Role

We are expanding our Datacentre Operations team in Singapore and are seeking an experienced datacentre engineer, ideally with a background in networking and/or systems administration, and proven low-latency trading infrastructure experience, to help run the physical layer of XTX’s datacentre infrastructure.

The role combines hands-on physical datacentre work including server racking, cabling, power management, component integration, supporting network deployment, APAC colocation project management in close collaboration with the Trading Development and Procurement teams.

The position is based in our Singapore office but will require occasional international travel to datacentres predominantly based Asia.  

Responsibilities

• You will lead and execute deployment of physical infrastructure in APAC datacentres primarily, and support datacentre operations activities globally.

• You will supervise and execute large projects (e.g., colocation setup and expansions, moving large amounts of equipment between sites) and maintain our datacentres (e.g., replacing failed components).

• You will be responsible for installing and maintaining a well-ordered datacentre infrastructure (e.g., designing, installing, and maintaining labelled, structured cabling, or power, space and cooling capacity monitoring and expansion).

• You will perform server integration work (e.g. fitting PCIe cards, NICs, etc into servers), hardware refreshes and failed component replacements.

• You will coordinate with third parties regarding infrastructure support.

• Produce and maintain operational runbooks, install guides, test plans and post-change verification; review and approve changes.

• Assist with inventory and logistics tasks as needed to support deployments (secondary responsibility, not a primary focus).

Essential Attributes

• 5+ years working in datacentres or infrastructure operations.

• Hands-on experience with switches/routers and low-latency network design (experience with Cisco, Mellanox, and Arista preferred).

• Proven experience building/operating low-latency trading infrastructure and APAC colocation projects.

• Network routing knowledge: BGP, OSPF and multicast routing (implementation and troubleshooting).

• Comfortable working inside servers: component installs, PCIe cards, firmware updates, and hardware diagnostics (experience with Dell servers a plus).

• Hands-on experience with fibre optics, transceivers (SFP/SFP+/QSFP/DWDM) and optical networking fundamentals.

• Strong change management, documentation and verification discipline.

• Excellent communication skills for vendor coordination, exchange/Broker integration and remote-hands instruction.
• Due to the nature of our trading, some work would necessarily have to happen during weekends, as such flexibility to work on Saturdays (with time-off in lieu) or a willingness to work a shifted week (for example Tuesday through Saturday) would be necessary.
• Fluent in both Mandarin & English.