At Mako, we believe in the power of collaboration to drive innovation in pursuit of our collective ambition; excellence in trading. Our diverse community is connected through a commitment to being the best we can be with the highest standards of integrity.
The IT Infrastructure team at Mako builds and runs the core technology that supports the firm's operations. The team works together to design and maintain a reliable, low-latency platform that the business depends on every day.
The Senior Infrastructure Engineer will work closely with the global technology team, supporting and maintaining high-availability network and Linux environments that underpin real-time trading operations. This role offers the opportunity to build deep hands-on experience across networking, automation, and systems engineering while contributing to a fast-paced, high-performance infrastructure in a collaborative environment.
What you'll be involved in:
- Promoting an infrastructure-as-code mind-set across the Infrastructure team and wider technology teams in the business
- Designing, testing, implementing, and optimizing our global Linux server and workstation environments to ensure performance and reliability
- Spearheading capacity planning, high-availability architecture, disaster recovery, and business continuity strategies to ensure zero-downtime operations during market hours
- Overseeing physical infrastructure deployments, including the installation, racking, and cabling of trading hardware
- Planning and engineering for capacity, disaster recovery, business continuity, and high availability
- Supporting, tuning, and scaling a real-time, latency-sensitive trading ecosystem distributed across multiple global colocation sites and data centers
- Acting as an escalation point for incidents; rapidly troubleshooting and resolving faults promptly
- Proactively monitoring system health, analyzing performance metrics, and identifying opportunities to reduce latency, improve throughput, and streamline operational workflows
- Guiding, mentoring, and upskilling junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and best practices
- Taking ownership of infrastructure projects from the design phase through to execution, acting as the technical lead and coordinating across multiple engineering disciplines
- Hybrid-Cloud Integration, bridging the gap between our low-latency on-prem systems and cloud environments
What we need from you:
- An excellent understanding of Linux operating systems and the performance, networking, and latency demands of trading infrastructure
- A proactive mindset that thrives on taking full, end-to-end ownership of the infrastructure platform and outcomes
- The composure and adaptability required to thrive, make critical decisions, and maintain accuracy in a fast-paced, dynamic, and high-pressure trading environment
- A relentless "can-do" attitude with the analytical depth to investigate, diagnose, and resolve complex system issues down to the root cause
- Technical interest in the details of systems engineering, particularly focused on trading infrastructure
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- An open-minded, forward-thinking approach to systems engineering
- Market awareness of current and future trends, practicises and evolving technologies
Technical Skills & Qualifications:
- 8+ years of professional experience in Linux system administration or systems engineering roles within a production environment.
- Expert-level administration, configuration, and troubleshooting of Linux distributions.
- Solid understanding of Linux internals, performance tuning and performance debugging tools.
- Proven experience building, deploying, and maintaining Linux servers and workstation fleets from the ground up, utilizing both physical bare-metal hardware and virtualization
- Exposure to high-throughput, low-latency network architectures and performance-sensitive configurations
- Solid understanding of network protocols and core services
- Hands-on experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible or Puppet
- Strong scripting and programming skills in Python and Shell (Bash); capability to write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code
- Hands-on experience working in physical data centre facilities, including rack mounting, cabling, inventory tracking, and hardware provisioning
- Solid exposure to enterprise monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, and CheckMK to maintain uptime and diagnose distributed system bottlenecks
- Solid experience with Podman and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes
- Hybrid & Cloud Experience, strong familiarity with a major cloud provider (preferably GCP or AWS), specifically around hybrid connectivity
- Familiarity with using AI-powered tools like Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude
We are Mako
At Mako, we are welcoming, inclusive and collaborative. We work fast and smart in a supportive and dress-down environment that allows colleagues to be themselves and achieve great things. We uphold the principles of a flat structure that offers unrivalled engagement with senior leadership and career development opportunities. We have a comprehensive benefits package, including:
- Flexible leave
- Annual discretionary bonus
- Healthcare allowance
- Comprehensive insurance benefits for life and salary continuance
- Employee wellbeing guidance and support
- Novated car leasing
- Generous paid parental leave scheme
- Opportunity to become involved in the rewarding work of the Mako foundation
About Mako
Mako is a leading options market maker with a global trading footprint. It has been at the forefront of options market making since 1999, from the open outcry trading pits to screen trading and automated algorithmic execution strategies that are driving the future of the industry.
From offices in London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore, Sydney, Brisbane and Chengdu, Mako offers the best-in-class liquidity solutions across Equities, Fixed Income, Commodities and FX derivatives markets and prides itself in its entrepreneurial, collaborative and philanthropic culture. If you require any reasonable adjustments or assistance during the recruitment process, please email [email protected] and we will arrange this.
For further information on the Mako Group please refer to our website: www.mako.com
Mako does not accept unsolicited CVs or candidate details from recruiters or search firms and will not pay any fees to such firms without a signed agreement.
