Senior System Engineer

The Team

We are seeking an experienced Senior Systems Engineer to join our Platform Engineering team. You'll play a critical role in managing, stabilizing, and progressively automating the infrastructure that underpins our global trading and research operations.

Our team is distributed across London, Sofia, and Boston, and operates at significant scale — tens of thousands of cores and hundreds of terabytes of memory supporting Python-based quantitative research and trading systems. We work closely with dedicated network, storage, database, and end-user teams, owning the compute, virtualization, containerization, and operating system layers of our stack.

We are on a meaningful journey: migrating from workloads to OpenStack as our primary virtualization platform, evolving from thick VMs toward lightweight container workloads on Kubernetes, and pushing our infrastructure automation from ~75% toward full IaC coverage.

Man Group operates a hybrid working model, with this role expected in the office 3 days per week.

Role Responsibilities

• Operating and evolving our compute infrastructure across VMware and OpenStack environments, supporting an active migration between the two platforms.
• Deploying, configuring, and maintaining Linux systems at scale - including OS provisioning, iDRAC/BMC configuration, and ensuring consistency across large fleets.
• Driving automation coverage using Terraform and Ansible, reducing manual toil and progressing our IaC maturity toward full coverage.
• Contributing to the operation and growth of our Kubernetes platform, supporting a strategic shift from VM-based workloads to containerized services.
• Diagnosing and resolving complex infrastructure problems, often under pressure, with the creativity and judgment to find solutions when the playbook doesn't cover the situation.
• Building and contributing to self-service platforms that empower hundreds of researchers, quants, and engineers across Man Group.
• Participating in a 24/7 on-call rota (approximately one week every five weeks) covering production environments.
• Leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools as part of your daily workflow to accelerate delivery and improve quality.
  
  

Key Competencies

Essential

• Solid, hands-on background in Linux systems administration at scale - you are deeply comfortable with Ubuntu, RHEL, or similar distributions and understand how things work under the hood.
• Experience with virtualisation platforms such as VMware vSphere or OpenStack, including day-to-day operations and troubleshooting.
• Practical experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools - Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent - with a genuine drive to automate repetitive and manual processes.
• Experience contributing to large-scale, complex infrastructure projects - such as platform migrations, major OS upgrade programmes, or infrastructure consolidations - with an understanding of the planning, risk, and coordination involved.
• Comfortable working in partially automated environments: able to fix things by hand when necessary while actively working to eliminate that need.
• Experience with scripting and automation using Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes - operating clusters, deploying workloads, and troubleshooting in production.
• Strong problem-solving instincts, especially in high-pressure or ambiguous situations.
• Willingness to participate in the on-call rota and take ownership during major incidents.

Advantageous

• Exposure to Open Stack in an operational context, or experience migrating workloads between hypervisors.
• Knowledge of GitOps practices and tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux.
• Experience with secrets management tools such as HashiCorp Vault.
• Familiarity with Windows Server environments - not a core requirement, but useful given residual footprint.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar).
• Exposure to observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or similar platforms.
• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries.
• Enthusiasm for AI-assisted development tools and a track record of adopting new tooling to improve personal and team productivity.