Research Computing Engineer/SRE

The Research Computing HPC team is a group of experts solving computing problems in the critical path of Research. We work directly with Research and Model Implementation teams and provide them with tools and computing resources to take their ideas from inception to real tradable products. We are looking for an ambitious and operationally minded software engineer to join our team as we mature and scale our cloud HPC platform to the next iteration of our firm-wide Research platform.

Why join us?
PDT Partners has a stellar 30+ year track record and a reputation for excellence. Our goal is to be the best quantitative investment manager in the world—measured by the quality of our products, not their size. PDT’s very high employee retention and mobility speaks for itself. Our people are intellectually extraordinary, and our community is close-knit, down-to-earth, and diverse. Our engineers love to work on challenging and complicated problems, and in return, they have a chance to make a direct impact on our bottom line, without the attitude and bureaucracy of a typical Wall Street firm.

Responsibilities:

We are a small flat team sitting at the cross-section of research, implementation, and platform infrastructure. Our team responsibilities span many areas. Below find a sampling of the types of work you will be expected to work on:

• Design and implementation of cloud-based HPC systems. Our projects involve equal parts engineering and operations for success in our fast-moving environment. You will be expected to conceive and implement projects small and large.


• Running our HPC plant day-to-day. Our research environment is up 24/7, and we want to keep it that way. Everybody on the team contributes to the support of our platform, which thankfully is light because of our automation and quality work.


• Implementing automation. We will always choose to work smart over working hard. You will be responsible for conception and implementation of automation from CI/CD pipelines to production metrics and monitoring of our cloud HPC platform.


• Obsessive User Focus. All members of the team are expected to partner with researchers and engineers to deliver high-quality cloud HPC systems that are efficient and reliable. This includes leading projects to evolve it as our needs change.


• Capacity management and benchmark optimization. Our demand for scale and performance is constant and involves challenging optimization problems for workloads critical to research and trading.

Below is a list of skills and experiences we think are relevant. Even if you don’t think you’re a perfect match, we still encourage you to apply because we are committed to developing our people.

• 5+ years of software engineering and/or systems programming experience


• 2+ years of experience working with a public cloud such as AWS


• Mastery of at least one programming language building production systems such as Python or Rust


• Experience with a production configuration management tool such as Salt/SaltStack


• Experience with a cloud-based infrastructure-as-code tool such as Terraform


• Excellent written and verbal communication skills


• Past experience working with or supporting researchers and/or other developers is a plus


• Knowledge of NVIDIA GPU management, Slurm, or similar HPC schedulers and resource managers is a plus

Education:
Bachelors or Masters degree in an Engineering or Applied Sciences field from a rigorous academic program or equivalent professional experience.

The salary range for this role is between $195,000 and $225,000. This range is not inclusive of any potential bonus amounts. Factors that may impact the agreed upon salary within the range for a particular candidate include years of experience, level of education obtained, skill set, and other external factors.