---
title: 'Systems Engineer at Aquatic Capital Management'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/systems-engineer-aquatic-capital-management-chicago-z28k0k7r8pme'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Systems Engineer at Aquatic Capital Management

- **Company:** Aquatic Capital Management
- **Location:** Chicago, IL
- **Posted:** 2026-05-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/aquaticcapitalmanagement/jobs/8541358002

## Job description

Aquatic was founded with a shared passion for tackling some of the most complex challenges in one of the world’s most competitive arenas—global financial markets. From the very beginning, we have been driven by a deep commitment to applying cutting-edge scientific research and technological innovation to deliver unparalleled performance. Our journey is one of continuous growth and exploration, marked by a spirit of curiosity and relentless drive for excellence.

Aquatic Capital Management is seeking a Systems Engineer to join our team.

Systems Engineer

Infrastructure & Research Computing

Aquatic Capital Management  •  Chicago, IL  •  Full-Time

## About the Role

- We are hiring a Systems Engineer to join our Infrastructure team. This is a senior individual contributor role with significant architectural ownership, and real accountability for how our research and trading systems compute.
- You will own and evolve the compute infrastructure that powers quantitative research and production trading at Aquatic: our on-premise grid, hybrid cloud compute (GCP and AWS), GPU workloads, storage systems, and the automation that ties it all together.

## What You Will Do

Grid & High-Performance Computing

- Own and evolve Aquatic's Slurm and Ray cluster infrastructure across on-prem and GCP — supporting research and trading workloads including fitting, tuning, backtesting, feature computation, and market data processing.
- Drive architectural improvements to capacity, scheduling efficiency, and throughput across the full footprint, including GPU computation.
- Design and maintain the connectivity and automation between on-prem and cloud environments
- Evaluate and implement newer compute paradigms as research needs evolve

Storage & Performance

- Own high-performance storage systems including VAST (NFS and S3-compatible), ensuring data access is fast and reliable across research, trading, and build workloads.
- Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks at the intersection of storage, network, and compute.

Developer Experience & Automation

- Design and maintain provisioning systems for complex compute resources and datacenter onboarding.
- Own and improve CI/CD infrastructure (GitHub Actions) as well as the development toolchain for the broader engineering organization.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

- Serve as the go-to architect for infrastructure decisions; provide technical direction and help establish vision across the team.
- Pair with and mentor earlier-career Systems & Software Engineers, helping them develop sound instincts and grow their skills.
- Diagnose and resolve the hardest, most obscure system issues that others cannot get to the bottom of.

## What We Are Looking For

Required

- 10+ years of experience in systems engineering, infrastructure, or a closely related discipline.
- Deep Unix/Linux expertise across multiple distributions; comfortable at every layer of the stack.
- Strong experience with HPC grid systems (SLURM preferred) in a research or scientific computing environment.
- Experience provisioning and managing bare-metal infrastructure and data centers, not just cloud-native environments.
- Familiarity with high-performance / parallel storage systems (VAST, GPFS, Lustre, or similar).
- Strong scripting and automation fluency (Bash, Python, or similar); able to build tools that others rely on and to contribute to and own production codebases.
- Ability to operate as an independent technical leader: establishing direction, building trusted relationships, and communicating clearly with stakeholders outside the team.

Strongly Preferred

- Experience with distributed compute frameworks such as Ray, Dask, or Spark in a research context.
- Low-level systems programming on Linux using C/C++, with a focus on performance and reliability.
- Experience with GPU computation and instrumenting GPU utilization for ML/research workloads.
- Hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure on GCP (or comparable major cloud), including autoscaling compute clusters.
- Strong networking fundamentals; able to design and troubleshoot complex network topologies including cloud interconnects.
- Background working alongside quantitative researchers or software engineers in a trading, finance, or research-intensive organization.

What Makes You Stand Out

- You have an architectural mindset: you think about how systems will fail before they do, and you build for stability and operational simplicity.
- You are energized by the intersection of systems and the people who use them. You want researchers and engineers to have great tools, not just working ones.
- You are a patient, generous mentor. You grow the people around you.
- You are direct, give well-reasoned dissenting opinions when you have them, and do not let ideas roll by unchallenged when you see a better path.

The base salary for this role is anticipated to be between $150,000 and $300,000, which is based on information at the time of posting. This position may also be eligible for additional forms of compensation, such as a discretionary bonus, and benefits. Discretionary bonus can be a significant portion of total compensation. Actual compensation for successful candidates will be carefully determined based on a number of factors, including their unique skills, qualifications and relevant experience. Benefits:

- Benefits: For full-time employees, fully paid medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents, competitive 401k plan, employer-paid life & disability insurance
- Perks: Wellness programs, casual dress, snacks, lunch, game room, team and company events
- Development: Open environment to maximize learning and knowledge sharing
- Time: Generous PTO, paid holidays, competitive paid caregiver leaves

[Aquatic Capital](https://www.aquatic.com/)

This role represents a unique opportunity to join a quantitative investment manager in its early stage of growth. The firm’s culture will be shaped by collaboration, meritocracy, ambition, and calm determination.

Aquatic is a proud equal opportunity workplace. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics.

## About Aquatic Capital Management

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Aquatic Capital Management is a quantitative investment management firm that combines a high-performance research and development platform with disciplined risk management to manage systematic strategies.
- **Entity Type**: Private (no disclosed funding rounds)
- **Headquarters**: Chicago, Illinois, United States
- **Founded**: Year not publicly available
- **Founders**: Jonathan Graham

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Financial Services (systematic quantitative investing)
- Target customers: Institutional investors (B2B)
- Mission or purpose statement: "Building a lasting quantitative investment manager" and "applying science and technology to build the world’s best prediction machine" [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/)

## Products & Services
- **Systematic Investment Strategies**: The firm manages quantitative strategies across global financial markets, leveraging a proprietary R&D platform for alpha generation and risk management.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Estimated annual revenue in the range of $5–15 million (unverified third-party estimate) [leadiq.com](https://leadiq.com/c/aquatic-capital-management/5dc09ebcfdf36bee53c436ab). Official figures not disclosed.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed; the firm commits its own capital alongside investors.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of ~100 employees (+3.5% YoY) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aquatic). LinkedIn followers grew +47.7% yearly. Active job postings increased +433.3% yearly, indicating aggressive hiring [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aquatic).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Talent Concentration**: Small, nimble team of best-in-class researchers and engineers in a carefully architected environment optimized for quiet focus and collaboration [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).
- **Founder Experience**: Jonathan Graham spent 13+ years at Citadel as a Partner and Senior Managing Director, leading the Global Quantitative Strategies business [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).
- **Culture of Meritocracy**: Values diverse backgrounds, collaboration, and steady determination with a flat structure where every voice counts [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).
- **Commitment to Carbon Neutrality**: Differentiator for environmentally conscious talent [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).

## Strategic Focus
- Continued investment in applied scientific research and development to build a lasting quantitative investment manager [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).
- Scaling the team across research, technology, and operations, with active hiring in Chicago, New York, and London [greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/aquaticcapitalmanagement).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Casual, relaxed environment designed for deep work and innovation; daily catered meals, happy hours, and office perks [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).
- **Work Model**: Offices in Chicago (HQ), New York, and London. Hybrid/remote policy not explicitly stated; roles appear office-based.
- **Benefits**: Comprehensive benefits, mentoring and development programs, open source projects, and "Vacation++" policy [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/).
- **Engineering & Research Focus**: High concentration of technical and research roles (29% technical, 23% research) with a tech stack including Python, C++, PyTorch, Kubernetes, and more [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aquatic).
- **Employee Rating**: 4.4/5.0 (based on 4 reviews) with perfect scores in compensation, culture, and career [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aquatic).

## Sources
1. [aquatic.com](https://www.aquatic.com/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aquatic)
3. [greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/aquaticcapitalmanagement)
4. [leadiq.com](https://leadiq.com/c/aquatic-capital-management/5dc09ebcfdf36bee53c436ab)

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