Systems Engineer

Location: Hybrid / Portland / Boston

Department: Engineering

The financial industry is growing at a record pace, but our data providers are still stuck in the past — with cumbersome onboarding processes, complicated APIs, slow infrastructure, and expensive licensing costs.

Databento is the market data platform for modern finance. The company provides real-time and historical data across futures, options, and equities through a unified API. By owning the entire market data stack end-to-end, Databento is the first platform of its kind to combine the performance and reliability demanded by the worlds leading trading firms with a dramatically simpler developer experience. Our team includes alumni of Two Sigma, Citadel Securities, Flow Traders, Tower Research, PDT Partners, SIG, and other top quantitative firms.

We offer health, dental, disability, and life insurance benefits, as well as 401(k) matching for full-time employees. 

Responsibilities

• Systems and network configuration.
• Bare-metal and containerized application deployment.
• Maintaining large storage clusters.
• Instrumenting performance measurement and alerts.
• Improving systems automation and tooling.
• On-call support.
• Coordinating bulk data delivery to customers and vendor partners.
• Occasional physical infrastructure deliveries and systems provisioning.

Required qualifications

• Strong Linux knowledge.
• Experience with systems configuration and provisioning (PXE, Puppet, and Ansible preferred; Terraform).
• Understanding of storage concepts (RAID, LVM, popular filesystems, distributed storage).
• Basic networking (OSI model, IP protocols, switching/routing).
• Ability to code in Python and write shell scripts.
• DevOps/GitOps mindset.
• Prior internship experience or 2+ years in full-time systems engineering or infrastructure roles.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.; H-1B visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph).
• Customer support experience and strong problem-solving abilities.
• Prior experience at a trading or fintech firm, or a strong interest in learning fintech.
• Database administration (MySQL, ClickHouse, Redis).
• Cloud engineering basics (AWS, GCP — compute, storage).
• Virtualization and compute workloads (Proxmox, Docker, Kubernetes, HTCondor).
• Systems and network tuning.
• Monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Loki).
• Ability to travel to data centers in Portland, New Jersey, or Boston on short notice (within one week).