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Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Linux Systems & Application Observability

tastytrade · Chicago, IL · $180,000–$200,000 a year · tt - Infrastructure

Posted Sep 8, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 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.

About your past

Tell me about self-healing automation you built. What did it fix on its own and what did it escalate?

What they are checking: Whether they know when automation should act and when a human must step in.

Tell me about a time you shaped engineering culture around reliability.

What they are checking: Whether they can influence how teams think about reliability, not just fix systems.

What would you do

As the first SRE here, how would you decide where to start?

What they are checking: Whether they can build a reliability practice from scratch by focusing on the biggest risks first.

You'd contribute code to Ruby, Java and Elixir services. How do you approach a codebase you didn't write?

What they are checking: Whether they can work embedded with app teams and make careful changes.

The market opens in 20 minutes and a key service is degraded. What do you do?

What they are checking: Whether they can act calmly under time pressure when client capital is on the line.

How do you reduce toil for platform and application teams without building tools nobody uses?

What they are checking: Whether they solve real pain points and get buy-in from the teams they support.

About the work

How would you run a gap analysis on an observability stack to find blind spots?

What they are checking: Whether they have a structured way to find missing telemetry before customers feel failures.

What SLOs would you set for order execution and market data delivery, and how would you measure them?

What they are checking: Whether they choose meaningful, customer-facing reliability targets for trading systems.

How does HashiCorp Nomad schedule work, and what would you watch as trading volume grows?

What they are checking: Whether they understand the scheduler and its scaling limits.

How do you design alerts so on-call engineers aren't buried in noise?

What they are checking: Whether they alert on symptoms that matter rather than every metric.

Practice this interview out loud.

Offer builds a real interview for this exact role at tastytrade from your resume and this job description, asks the questions one at a time, and tells you what landed. The first one is free.

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The full job description

As published by tastytrade.

Company Name: tastytrade Role: Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Linux Systems & Application Observability Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid, 3 days/week in office) Role Summary Come join tastytrade, part of IG Group, as we build the reliability practice behind the brokerage platform that active options, futures, and equities traders rely on every market day. As our first Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you'll harden the systems behind order execution and market data delivery — designing for fault tolerance, closing gaps in our telemetry, and making sure our HashiCorp Nomad-based service fabric scales cleanly as trading volume grows. You'll work embedded alongside our infrastructure and application engineering teams, contributing directly to our Ruby, Java, and Elixir services. This is a rare opportunity to shape a practice and a culture from day one, on a platform where every order, quote, and position has to be right, because real client capital is on the line. What You'll Do (Job Responsibilities) • Build self-healing, fault-tolerant infrastructure and internal tooling that automates repetitive operational work and reduces toil for Platform and Application teams. • Run gap analysis across our observability stack to find blind spots in telemetry, logging, and alerting coverage, then close them so failures surface before customers feel them. • Own scalability work across our HashiCorp Nomad service fabric: capacity planning, load testing, and identifying architectural bottlenecks before they become incidents. • Extend our observability stack (Prometheus, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry) with the instrumentation needed to actually see the failure modes above. • Set SLOs and error budgets with multi-window burn-rate alerting for critical brokerage flows, once the fault-tolerance and telemetry foundation is in place. • Mentor engineers across teams to build a culture of site reliability champions so the practice outlives any one person. Who You Are (Skills Needed) • Hands-on experience designing fault-tolerant, self-healing distributed systems — not just describing the patterns, but having shipped them. • Deep understanding of one or more: distributed systems, Linux systems, cloud-native architectures, containerization. • Experience running gap analyses on observability/telemetry systems: identifying what's not instrumented, not alerted on, or not visible until it's too late. • A track record scaling systems under real production load, including capacity planning and architectural bottleneck identification. • Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana, with the ability to instrument services directly. • Strong Linux internals and networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, UDP/multicast, packet capture, and flow analysis. • On-call experience on production systems and comfort building a blameless post-incident review process. • Working knowledge of SLOs and error budgets as a tool, not the job description; HashiCorp Nomad, Consul, or Vault experience is a strong plus. • Strong programming skills in a language such as Python, Ruby, Java, or similar. Company Perks + Benefits:    &nbsp; • Performance Bonuses   &nbsp; • Stock Purchase Options   &nbsp; • Medical/Vision/Dental Benefits &nbsp; • 401k Plan  &nbsp; • 20 Paid Vacation Days (plus an&nbsp;additional&nbsp;paid vacation&nbsp;day&nbsp;the month of your birthday!)   &nbsp; • 10 Paid Sick Days   &nbsp; • Gym Membership Reimbursement   &nbsp; • Commuter Benefits   &nbsp; • Pet Insurance   &nbsp; • Wellness & Mental Health Programs   &nbsp; • Charitable Donation Matching   &nbsp; • Two Paid Volunteer Days Off   &nbsp; • Daily catered lunch when in the office   &nbsp; • Full kitchen with snacks and beverages   &nbsp; • In-building gym   &nbsp; • Shuttle to/from Metra   &nbsp; Base Salary Range:&nbsp; $180,000-$200,000 The actual salary offered will be based on the candidate's level of experience and qualifications. &nbsp; Discretionary Performance Bonus: 15-20% of base salary based on individual and company performance.&nbsp;&nbsp; About IGNA&nbsp;+ tasty &nbsp;&nbsp; IG North America is home to tastytrade,&nbsp;tasty live & &nbsp;tastyfx—a family of brands built to democratize trading and empower individual investors. Founded in Chicago by the creators of&nbsp;thinkorswim,&nbsp;acquired&nbsp;by London-based IG Group in 2021, we combine startup innovation with the backing of&nbsp;a&nbsp;FTSE 100 fintech&nbsp;operating&nbsp;across five continents serving over 1.3m customers and handling billions of dollars in transactions – built on scale, trust, and proof.&nbsp; From our headquarters in Chicago's Fulton Market, our team builds award-winning trading platforms, produces live financial education content daily, and creates technology that makes complex markets accessible. tastytrade is our retail brokerage for self-directed investing and trading, with&nbsp;tasty live &nbsp;providing content to educate our customers. tastyfx is the fastest-growing forex broker in the US.&nbsp;tastycrypto&nbsp;provides self-custody digital wallets for decentralized finance.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; We're&nbsp;a lean, collaborative team that values autonomy, pragmatism, and impact. Whether&nbsp;you're&nbsp;building technology, creating content, serving customers, or supporting operations,&nbsp;you'll&nbsp;work alongside people who are passionate about disrupting traditional finance and genuinely care about helping traders succeed. Our culture rewards initiative, embraces experimentation, and measures success by the value we create for our users.&nbsp;The bar is high – bring a curious and forward-thinking&nbsp;mindset&nbsp;and&nbsp;we'll&nbsp;give you the platform to define what comes next. Join us at IG|tasty – the future gets built here.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Location:  Our office is in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars.&nbsp;&nbsp; <a id="menurs0i" class="fui-Link ___1q1shib f2hkw1w f3rmtva f1ewtqcl fyind8e f1k6fduh f1w7gpdv fk6fouc fjoy568 figsok6 f1s184ao f1mk8lai fnbmjn9 f1o700av f13mvf36 f1cmlufx f9n3di6 f1ids18y f1tx3yz7 f1deo86v f1eh06m1 f1iescvh fhgqx19 f1olyrje f1p93eir f1nev41a f1h8hb77 f1lqvz6u f10aw75t fsle3fq f17ae5zn" href="https://tastytrade.com/" target="_blank"> tastytrade &nbsp;|&nbsp; <a id="menurs0k" class="fui-Link ___1q1shib f2hkw1w f3rmtva f1ewtqcl fyind8e f1k6fduh f1w7gpdv fk6fouc fjoy568 figsok6 f1s184ao f1mk8lai fnbmjn9 f1o700av f13mvf36 f1cmlufx f9n3di6 f1ids18y f1tx3yz7 f1deo86v f1eh06m1 f1iescvh fhgqx19 f1olyrje f1p93eir f1nev41a f1h8hb77 f1lqvz6u f10aw75t fsle3fq f17ae5zn" href="https://www.tastylive.com/" target="_blank"> tasty live   |&nbsp; <a id="menurs0m" class="fui-Link ___1q1shib f2hkw1w f3rmtva f1ewtqcl fyind8e f1k6fduh f1w7gpdv fk6fouc fjoy568 figsok6 f1s184ao f1mk8lai fnbmjn9 f1o700av f13mvf36 f1cmlufx f9n3di6 f1ids18y f1tx3yz7 f1deo86v f1eh06m1 f1iescvh fhgqx19 f1olyrje f1p93eir f1nev41a f1h8hb77 f1lqvz6u f10aw75t fsle3fq f17ae5zn" href="https://www.tastyfx.com/" target="_blank"> tastyfx &nbsp; &nbsp; 1330 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; *Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they have every single qualification. Our team is dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if&nbsp;you’re&nbsp;excited about this&nbsp;role,&nbsp;but your experience&nbsp;doesn’t&nbsp;align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles!

Apply at tastytrade