Linux Engineering Team Lead

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL · CTC Trading Group, LLC

Posted Sep 11, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026

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

Tell me about a time you led a team through a major infrastructure change while also staying hands-on with the technical work. How did you split your time?

whether the candidate can genuinely operate as a working manager, not just delegate

Tell me about a time you had a direct report who was underperforming. What did you do and how did it turn out?

comfort with the harder parts of people management, not just team-building

Tell me about a time you built or improved a runbook or incident response process. What was broken before, and how did you know it worked afterward?

real experience building operational discipline rather than just following existing process

Tell me about a time you had to translate a vague business need into a concrete technical roadmap for your team.

ability to bridge business context and execution planning, a core part of the role

Tell me about a time a stakeholder outside your team pushed back hard on your technical recommendation. What happened?

stakeholder management and ability to hold ground without damaging the relationship

Technical

Walk me through how you'd diagnose a sudden latency spike on a production trading server when nothing in the standard monitoring dashboards points to a cause.

depth of Linux internals knowledge and systematic debugging under pressure

How would you design a patching and lifecycle strategy for a global fleet of servers where some machines can never tolerate unplanned downtime?

ability to reconcile operational rigor with the determinism trading systems demand

What's the most complex Linux performance problem you've personally solved down to the kernel or hardware level, and what tools did you use?

whether claimed deep systems knowledge holds up to specifics

How do you decide what to automate first when you inherit a fleet that's been managed mostly by hand?

judgment about prioritization and return on engineering effort, not just automation enthusiasm

What's your experience with low-latency tuning, things like CPU isolation, NUMA, interrupt handling, or kernel bypass? Give me a specific example.

whether the candidate has actually worked in low-latency environments versus generic Linux administration

Situational

Say a network team wants to push a change that could affect latency-sensitive trading hosts, and your team disagrees with the timing. How do you handle that conversation?

cross-team negotiation skill and willingness to hold a technical line under organizational pressure

You're paged at 3 a.m. because a critical trading system's Linux hosts are behaving erratically right before market open. Walk me through what you do in the first ten minutes.

composure and prioritization during high-stakes, time-boxed incidents

If two engineers on your team strongly disagreed about the right architecture for a new orchestration cluster, how would you help them reach a decision?

mentorship style and decision-making process when facing internal technical conflict

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The full job description

As published by Chicago Trading Company.

<div class="content-intro">Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm specializing in options market making.  Our collaborative culture fuels innovation in quantitative research, systematic trading strategies, and cutting-edge trading technology.  For over three decades CTC has provided critical liquidity across derivatives exchanges worldwide - making them fairer, more transparent, and more efficient. We strive to be the most innovative firm in the industry today, tomorrow, and long into the future while upholding ethical excellence. We believe that CTC makes a positive impact on the markets, the lives of our employees, and all the communities to which we belong. Started in 1995 by a team of forward-thinking Traders, we are proud to call ourselves an industry leader that keeps making markets and each other better.</div>  As a Linux Engineering Team Lead, you will oversee the Linux Engineering team while remaining hands-on. You’ll help set technical direction and operational standards for Linux infrastructure supporting our real-time trading environment, development systems, research compute, and orchestration clusters. This role requires deep technical, operational, and people leadership skills to deliver results across the trading platform. <h3 id="What-You'll-Do" data-local-id="2a2856ef-d52f-464b-9624-3ac824f1776a" data-renderer-start-pos="1130">What You'll Do</h3> <ul class="ak-ul" data-local-id="62ede8af-cbac-4947-b896-fd8e65b817c0" data-indent-level="1"> <li> Lead and develop the Linux Engineering team; translate business needs into a clear roadmap and drive accountability across project and operational work </li> <li> Own the design, implementation, and operation of a global Linux infrastructure footprint with a focus on reliability, performance, and determinism </li> <li> Automate and standardize fleet operations (provisioning, configuration management, patching, upgrades, lifecycle) and improve monitoring/alerting to reduce time-to-detect and time-to-recover </li> <li> Establish operational excellence (runbooks, incident response, post-incident learning) and mentor engineers through debugging, performance tuning, and architecture decisions </li> <li> Partner across execution, network, and development teams to plan and coordinate changes; guide projects end-to-end and participate in an on-call rotation </li> </ul> <h3 id="What-we're-looking-for" data-local-id="b74e928f-4c5e-4752-8fff-a0bdc004d094" data-renderer-start-pos="1981">What we're looking for</h3> <ul class="ak-ul" data-local-id="0b35abe4-55b2-400a-931f-8c47c24dc8c2" data-indent-level="1"> <li> Experience managing a team of people (e.g., conducting 1:1s, contributing to hiring or performance decisions) </li> <li> Extensive experience supporting a large-scale, global Linux server fleet and low-latency Linux systems </li> <li> Deep knowledge of Linux internals and systems-level debugging, with a track record of solving performance issues </li> <li> Demonstrated success in leadership and stakeholder management </li> <li> Strong problem-solving under pressure and a collaborative, customer-service mindset; financial trading industry experience preferred </li> </ul>   Salary Range: $200,000 - $250,000, plus a discretionary bonus. The discretionary bonus will be dependent upon the individuals skills, experience, qualifications, and firm performance.   <div class="content-conclusion">Most teams at CTC, with the exception of Trading, follow a hybrid workplace model, subject to change based on business need. Our Benefits  We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families so we offer outstanding benefits to support you both professionally and personally. These benefits include generous time off, insurance coverage, paid parental leave, free breakfast and lunch (plus healthy snacks, of course), wellness reimbursement, and a variety of other benefits focused on providing the best employee experience.  (Disclaimer: interns and contractors are not eligible for benefits at CTC)  Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion At CTC, we aim to cultivate a workplace that celebrates diversity and each person feels included, engaged and empowered. Where each of us feels we belong. We are committed to having a diverse workforce and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. CTC does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.  If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or to apply for a position, please contact us at info@chicagotrading.com. Note that emails sent to this email account for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response. Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Information submitted by job applicants may be subject to review and analysis by automated systems, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), as part of the recruitment process. Such systems are utilized to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our hiring procedures. Applicants are advised that any information provided may be evaluated by AI tools to ensure an equitable and thorough assessment.</div>

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Linux Engineering Team Lead

Likely interview questions for this role

Practice this interview out loud.

The full job description

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