JobsJump Trading

HPC Systems Engineer

Jump Trading · Chicago, IL · IT Infrastructure + WCW

Posted Aug 14, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

Behavioral

Describe a time you had to profile or debug an application that a researcher or user handed you without much context about what it was supposed to do.

ability to work across unfamiliar codebases and collaborate with non-infrastructure people

How do you approach root cause analysis after an incident is resolved, when the pressure to just move on is high?

whether root cause discipline is a real habit or something they only do when forced

Tell me about a maintenance window you ran that touched a large chunk of production infrastructure. What went wrong, and what would you do differently?

experience coordinating high-stakes, high-blast-radius operations

This role involves rotating on-call and occasional weekend maintenance. Tell me about how you've handled sustained on-call responsibility in the past.

honesty about tolerance for unpredictable hours and whether their track record backs it up

Describe a situation where you had to work with an outside hardware or software vendor to resolve a problem you couldn't fix yourself.

ability to manage vendor relationships and advocate for the company's technical needs

Technical

Walk me through a time you had a parallel filesystem, like Lustre or GPFS, degrade under load in production. How did you find the bottleneck and what did you fix?

whether they have real hands-on debugging experience with large-scale storage systems, not just textbook knowledge

Tell me about a piece of tooling you built to compile, package, or upgrade software at scale across a large fleet of Linux machines.

depth of automation and config management experience versus one-off scripting

Which configuration management tool have you used most, Salt, Ansible, or Puppet, and what is something that tool handled badly that you had to work around?

real operational scars versus surface familiarity with the tool

What's your go-to language for systems tooling, Go, Python, or C, and can you describe something you built that would have been painful in the other two?

genuine language proficiency and judgment about tool fit, not just resume keywords

Tell me about a distributed system you designed or maintained that had a lot of interdependent parts. What made it fragile, and how did you make it less so?

experience with complex system architecture and understanding of failure modes, not just operating someone else's design

How do you decide what belongs in monitoring versus alerting, on a system this large, so people aren't drowning in noise?

judgment about signal versus noise in fault and performance monitoring at scale

Situational

Say Slurm jobs across the cluster start failing intermittently but the nodes look healthy. How would you go about isolating the cause?

structured troubleshooting approach across a distributed batch scheduling system

If a researcher tells you their job is running slower on the cluster than they expect, but nothing in your monitoring looks abnormal, what do you check first?

whether they know how to bridge the gap between infrastructure metrics and researcher-perceived performance

How do you decide when documentation is worth writing versus when it's just going to rot, given how fast these systems change?

practical judgment about sustaining institutional knowledge in a fast-moving environment

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The full job description

As published by Jump Trading.

<p data-renderer-start-pos="1448">Jump Trading Group is committed to world class research. We empower exceptional talents in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to seek scientific boundaries, push through them, and apply cutting edge research to global financial markets. Our culture is unique. Constant innovation requires fearlessness, creativity, intellectual honesty, and a relentless competitive streak. We believe in winning together and unlocking unique individual talent by incenting collaboration and mutual respect. At Jump, research outcomes drive more than superior risk adjusted returns. We design, develop, and deploy technologies that change our world, fund start-ups across industries, and partner with leading global research organizations and universities to solve problems.</p> <p data-renderer-start-pos="935">Our global High Performance Computing Team is looking to add a Production Engineer in our Chicago office. The scale of our computing environments provides unique challenges in providing good performance and reliability. Several systems including compute, scheduling, networks, and large-scale data storage must integrate seamlessly to support data pipelines and quantitative research. The ideal candidate would be a hands-on individual, highly skilled in the details and nuances of managing Linux environments with a strong software development background necessary to support uniquely customized systems at scale.&nbsp;</p> <p data-renderer-start-pos="1248"><strong data-renderer-mark="true">What You'll Do:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Daily access to world-class, large-scale production systems as well as an unparalleled high-performance research “supercomputer”</li> <li>Perform the functions of architect, engineer, and administrator</li> <li>Work on a variety of production engineering projects and troubleshooting a range of IT problems</li> <li>Design, implement, maintain, and support high performance compute and storage systems</li> <li>Implement and support performance monitoring and fault monitoring systems</li> <li>Monitor systems and storage performance, up to and including network components</li> <li>Build tooling to compile, package, install, and upgrade software and operating system components at scale</li> <li>Collaborate with team members and across teams to write code and testing infrastructures spanning both new and existing codebases in multiple programming languages</li> <li>Develop and improve systems and user documentation</li> <li>Participate in large, coordinated maintenance operations, including during evenings and weekends.</li> <li>Work on global projects across a wide range of infrastructure</li> <li>Collaborate directly with researchers to optimize their use of HPC infrastructure</li> <li>Develop and monitor the tools used to maintain a production computing environment</li> <li>Provide operational support on a rotating basis and as needed</li> <li>Manage relationships with outside vendors, including traveling both domestically and internationally to meet with current and potential vendors</li> <li>Adhere to all company cybersecurity and IT policies, including performing all work using only approved hardware and software</li> <li>Other duties as assigned or needed</li> </ul> <p data-renderer-start-pos="2026"><strong data-renderer-mark="true">Skills You'll Need:</strong></p> <ul> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">5+ years of professional experience in high performance computing (HPC), including parallel filesystems (e.g., Lustre, GPFS), batch systems (e.g., Slurm, Grid Engine), and high-performance network interconnects experience is a plus, but not required</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">5+ years of experience with Linux systems administration</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">High proficiency with at least one programming/scripting language (e.g., Go, Python, C)</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">Extensive experience designing, building, and maintaining complicated, interdependent, and distributed systems</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">Extensive experience profiling and debugging application stacks (debuggers and profilers)</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">Experience with system configuration management tools (SaltStack, Ansible, Puppet, etc.)</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">A compulsion to perform root cause analysis</li> <li data-renderer-start-pos="2026">Reliable and predictable availability&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>If you are currently a student or recent graduate, please see our Campus postings which offer both intern and full-time opportunities.<br></strong></p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 14px;">Benefits</span></strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Discretionary bonus eligibility </span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Medical, dental, and vision insurance</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">HSA, FSA, and Dependent Care options</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Employer Paid Group Term Life and AD&amp;D Insurance</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Voluntary Life &amp; AD&amp;D insurance</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Paid vacation plus paid holidays</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Retirement plan with employer match</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Paid parental leave</span></li> <li style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Wellness Programs</span><br><br></span></span></li> </ul></div><div class="title">Annual Base Salary Range </div><div class="pay-range"><span>$150,000</span><span class="divider">&mdash;</span><span>$200,000 USD</span></div></div></div>

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