Senior Automation Engineer (Platform & AI)

Hamilton Barnes · Chicago, United States

Job Title: Senior Automation Engineer (Platform & AI)

Location: New York, Chicago or Kansas City

Salary: Up to $225,000 TC

Do you want to work for a global financial technology business delivering the infrastructure, trading platforms and investment solutions that connect market participants worldwide.

We are seeking a Senior Automation Engineer to help transform our infrastructure team into a full-scale platform automation function over the next three years. This role combines hands-on site reliability engineering with the design and operation of AI-driven automation, with Kubernetes as the central pillar.

What you'll do

Build, deploy, and operate containerized workloads at scale — currently ~50 microservices running on Docker Swarm, migrating to Kubernetes as the corporate standard

Own and evolve the Kubernetes platform, including container orchestration, service resilience, and infrastructure-as-code

Design and run agentic AI systems in production — agent harnesses, context management, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering — with attention to token cost optimization and observability

Implement hybrid model strategies: lightweight/on-prem LLMs (e.g., via OpenRouter) for routine decisions, frontier models for complex reasoning tasks

Partner across engineering, security, and compliance to ensure AI systems are observable, auditable, and defensible

Lead technically without formal authority; mentor engineers on Linux, containers, and automation practices

What you'll bring

Strong SRE or sysadmin background with deep hands-on Kubernetes and Docker/container experience

Solid Linux fundamentals; comfortable troubleshooting at the OS, network, and application layers

Basic networking literacy (routing/switching concepts) — no expert-level certification required

Working knowledge of LLM APIs, agent orchestration patterns, and building reliable AI pipelines in production

Security-minded: aware of AI-specific risks (prompt injection, tool misuse, data leakage) and how to mitigate them

Python or Go for automation and tooling; CI/CD and IaC experience (e.g., Terraform, Ansible)

Clear communicator — able to translate technical trade-offs into decisions leadership can act on

Financial services or other regulated industry experience is a plus

1. Emilio – do 2 slots for this one – new York / chicago

Title: Low Latency Network Engineer

Location: New York or Chicago (4x per week onsite)

Salary: Up to 250k base + bonus ($500K TOTAL COMP IS POSSIBLE)

Take a leading technical role in shaping the global networks behind a performance-critical financial technology business. You’ll influence architecture, deliver major infrastructure projects and help develop an experienced engineering team.

The role:

- Design resilient, high-performance networks across data centres and cloud environments.

- Own complex upgrades, from lab testing through deployment.

- Build Python tooling to automate changes and improve reliability.

- Resolve challenging routing and performance issues.

- Guide technical decisions and mentor engineers.

What you’ll bring:

- CCIE Level of Network Engineering (Certification preferred)

- Extensive experience supporting business-critical networks.

- Strong BGP, OSPF, multicast and MPLS knowledge.

- Hands-on Python automation and cloud networking experience.

- A practical understanding of latency, monitoring and network security.

- Confidence owning projects and explaining technical decisions.