Senior Platform Engineer, Build & Developer Infrastructure

Tower Research Capital is a leading quantitative trading firm founded in 1998. Tower has built its business on a high-performance platform and independent trading teams. We have a 25+ year track record of innovation and a reputation for discovering unique market opportunities.

Tower is home to some of the world’s best systematic trading and engineering talent. We empower portfolio managers to build their teams and strategies independently while providing the economies of scale that come from a large, global organization.

Engineers thrive at Tower while developing electronic trading infrastructure at a world class level. Our engineers solve challenging problems in the realms of low-latency programming, FPGA technology, hardware acceleration and machine learning. Our ongoing investment in top engineering talent and technology ensures our platform remains unmatched in terms of functionality, scalability and performance.

At Tower, every employee plays a role in our success. Our Business Support teams are essential to building and maintaining the platform that powers everything we do — combining market access, data, compute, and research infrastructure with risk management, compliance, and a full suite of business services. Our Business Support teams enable our trading and engineering teams to perform at their best.

At Tower, employees will find a stimulating, results-oriented environment where highly intelligent and motivated colleagues inspire each other to reach their greatest potential.

Summary:

We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help build, operate, and improve the software delivery and developer infrastructure platforms used by engineering teams working on large-scale C++ and Python applications. This role combines platform engineering, CI/CD, build systems, infrastructure automation, observability, artifact management, and developer productivity. The ideal candidate has strong systems engineering fundamentals and practical experience supporting complex engineering workflows in a production-critical environment.

Responsibilities:

Designing, building, and enhancing tools that support developer productivity, systems infrastructure, and DevOps practices

Partner with the global Platform, Developer Infrastructure, and Release Engineering team to align regional solutions with global standards while representing local engineering, operational, and business priorities.

Maintain and improve build and release infrastructure for large-scale C++ and Python applications, including build tooling, dependency management, CI/CD integration, artifact workflows, and developer self-service capabilities.

Partner with software engineers, infrastructure engineers, quants, traders, and SRE teams to design, build, and operate reliable software delivery platforms.

Design, develop, and operate scalable CI/CD pipelines for build, test, artifact promotion, deployment, and release workflows.

Build and maintain infrastructure automation and configuration management solutions for platform, CI/CD, artifact, and developer infrastructure services.

Develop internal developer tooling and self-service platform capabilities that reduce operational toil and improve developer productivity.

Use containerization and orchestration technologies to support reproducible builds, reliable CI/CD execution, and consistent deployment workflows.

Improve observability for build, CI/CD, release, and platform services through centralized logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.

Troubleshoot and optimize build, CI/CD, artifact, and developer infrastructure systems with a focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and security.

Implement software supply chain security practices, including artifact provenance, dependency management, vulnerability scanning, secret management, and CI/CD security controls.

Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement for platform-owned build, release, CI/CD, and developer infrastructure services.

Evaluate and recommend improvements to build, release, CI/CD, developer infrastructure, observability, and software delivery platforms.

Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

7+ years of hands-on engineering experience building, operating, or improving software delivery, platform, infrastructure, CI/CD, DevOps, SRE, or developer productivity systems.

Strong Linux systems knowledge and troubleshooting skills.

Strong understanding of software build systems, especially for large C++ codebases; experience with CMake, Ninja, Bazel, Buck2, or similar tools.

Experience with Python packaging, dependency management, and environment management tools such as pip, conda, uv, pixi, or similar.

Experience building and operating CI/CD platforms, including pipeline design, build/test automation, artifact promotion, secrets handling, and failure diagnosis.

Experience with artifact repositories, binary/package distribution, and artifact lifecycle management using tools such as Artifactory, Nexus, Harbor, or similar.

Experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or similar.

Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker or Podman; familiarity with orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, or similar.

Experience with cloud, hybrid, or on-premises infrastructure environments; AWS, GCP, Azure, or private infrastructure experience preferred.

Proficiency in Python and shell scripting.

Experience with Git and collaborative development workflows.

Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, TLS, HTTP, routing, and service discovery.

Practical understanding of distributed systems reliability concepts.

Experience gathering developer feedback and translating recurring pain points into self-service tooling, automation, documentation, or platform improvements.

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to work in a fast-paced, globally distributed engineering environment.

Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Experience with:

Troubleshooting C++ build, linkage, dependency, ABI, compiler, linker, and toolchain issues in large codebases.

Modernizing legacy build systems.

Improving build reproducibility, reducing build times, or introducing remote caching / remote execution.

Designing reproducible Python environments and internal package distribution workflows.

Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, OpenSearch, or similar.

Workflow orchestration technologies such as Airflow.

Familiarity with GitOps deployment methodologies.

Building internal developer portals, self-service workflows, or paved-road developer platforms.

Systems programming languages such as C++ and/or Rust.

Familiarity with software supply chain security practices such as dependency provenance, vulnerability scanning, and secret management.

Integrating AI-assisted development tools into engineering workflows while maintaining appropriate security, access control, and code review practices.

Anticipated New York annual base salary range $150,000 - $200,000, plus eligible for discretionary bonus.

Tower’s headquarters are in the historic Equitable Building, right in the heart of NYC’s Financial District and our impact is global, with over a dozen offices around the world.

At Tower, we believe work should be both challenging and enjoyable. That is why we foster a culture where smart, driven people thrive – without the egos. Our open concept workplace, casual dress code, and well-stocked kitchens reflect the value we place on a friendly, collaborative environment where everyone is respected, and great ideas win.

Our benefits include:

Generous paid time off policies

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