Principal Infrastructure Architect – Linux, VMware & Low Latency Platforms
Experience: 8+ Years
Overview:
Kotak Institutional Equities is India's leading institutional brokerage and electronic trading businesses, providing execution, research, algorithmic trading, DMA, and derivatives trading solutions across Indian capital markets.
Role Overview:
We are seeking a hands-on Principal Infrastructure Architect to lead the design, automation, security, and operational management of our Linux infrastructure platform.
The role will own our predominantly on-premise infrastructure estate (80%), including Linux servers, VMware/VxRail environments, low-latency trading infrastructure, cloud platforms, automation frameworks, and enterprise security standards.
The ideal candidate combines deep Linux expertise with strong virtualization, cloud, automation, and performance engineering skills, and can operate as both an architect and hands-on technical leader.
Key Responsibilities
Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
- Architect, build, and manage enterprise Linux infrastructure.
- Lead VMware vSphere, ESXi, and Dell VxRail platform strategy.
- Define standards for provisioning, monitoring, capacity planning, and lifecycle management.
- Drive infrastructure reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
Automation & Provisioning
- Build Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks using Terraform, Ansible, Python, and Shell scripting.
- Automate server provisioning, user onboarding/offboarding, workspace creation, configuration management, and compliance reporting.
- Establish repeatable and scalable infrastructure deployment processes.
Security & Governance
- Own Linux security hardening, access management, patching, and vulnerability remediation.
- Implement RBAC, PAM, MFA, SSO, Active Directory/LDAP integration, and security best practices.
- Define enterprise patch management and infrastructure governance standards.
Low Latency Engineering
- Design and optimize low-latency Linux environments supporting electronic trading workloads.
- Expertise in NUMA, CPU isolation, IRQ affinity, real-time scheduling, kernel tuning, and network performance optimization.
- Drive performance benchmarking and latency reduction initiatives.
High Performance Lab (HPL)
- Establish and lead a High Performance Lab for evaluating low-latency infrastructure technologies.
- Benchmark servers, CPUs, NICs, storage, virtualization platforms, and cloud infrastructure.
- Develop testing methodologies for latency, throughput, and performance validation.
Observability, Monitoring & Reliability Engineering
- Define and implement the firm's infrastructure observability strategy across Linux, VMware/VxRail, cloud, and trading platforms.
- Establish enterprise monitoring standards covering infrastructure health, performance, capacity, security, and availability.
- Design and deploy monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting frameworks for proactive incident detection and resolution.
- Build dashboards and operational visibility for infrastructure, trading connectivity, market data systems, and business-critical applications.
- Implement capacity planning, trend analysis, and performance forecasting across compute, storage, network, and virtualization platforms.
Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure
- Design and support AWS, Azure, and/or GCP environments.
- Build hybrid cloud architectures and automation-driven operational models.
Required Skills:
- Expert Linux/UNIX administration and architecture
- VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, Dell VxRail
- Terraform, Ansible, Python, Shell Scripting
- Infrastructure Security & Access Management
- AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Networking, TCP/IP, DNS, Firewalls, Load Balancing
- Performance Engineering and Low-Latency Infrastructure
Preferred Experience:
- Electronic Trading, Capital Markets, Brokerage, Exchange Connectivity, or HFT environments.
- Experience supporting market data, order routing, and latency-sensitive systems.
- Building infrastructure performance labs or benchmarking environments.
Success Profile:
The successful candidate will serve as the technical authority for Linux and infrastructure engineering, drive automation and security initiatives, establish a High Performance Lab, and continuously improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of the firm's infrastructure platforms.
