Trading Systems & Automation Engineer
A hybrid trading-engineering role focused on building fully autonomous, production-grade systems that support traders and run reliably with no day-to-day maintenance.
About the role
Role overview
Portofino is hiring a Trading Systems & Automation Engineer to sit at the intersection of trading, engineering, and infrastructure. The role is designed for someone who understands trading workflows and applies Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to trading‑adjacent systems.
Your mission is to design, build, and deploy fully autonomous, production‑grade tooling that improves trading efficiency, robustness, and operational safety — with no ongoing manual maintenance. Systems must be reliable by design, observable, and able to operate independently once deployed.
You will act as the technical bridge between traders and engineering teams (connectivity engineers, infrastructure, DevOps), translating trading needs into resilient, self‑sustaining solutions.
Responsibilities
- Work closely with traders to understand workflows, pain points, and operational risks.
- Design and implement autonomous tools, services, and automation that eliminate manual processes around trading activity.
- Apply SRE principles to trading systems: automation over manual intervention, reliability over complexity, and failure‑aware design.
- Ensure all systems are production‑ready: strong error handling, observability, alerting, and safe degradation under failure.
- Translate trader requirements into clear technical specifications when deeper infrastructure or connectivity work is required.
- Collaborate with connectivity, infrastructure, and DevOps engineers to deploy and integrate tooling into production environments.
- Design systems to minimise operational burden, on‑call needs, and long‑term maintenance.
Requirements
Must Have
- Strong technical background building production‑grade systems or tools in trading, fintech, or similarly demanding environments.
- Proven experience designing automation that runs autonomously with minimal operational overhead.
- Strong reliability mindset: ability to reason about failure modes, edge cases, and recovery paths before deployment.
- Solid understanding of production monitoring, observability, and alerting.
- Ability to work end‑to‑end with high autonomy, from design to deployment.
Nice to Have
- Experience in electronic or crypto trading environments (exchange APIs, market data, connectivity).
- Familiarity with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation.
- Exposure to SRE concepts such as SLIs/SLOs, alert fatigue reduction, and graceful degradation.
- Experience working in latency‑sensitive or high‑availability systems.
Personality Traits
- Calm, methodical, and risk‑aware, especially in production environments.
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability for system behaviour once live.
- Comfortable challenging requirements and simplifying solutions.
- Enjoys building systems that are correct, robust, and quietly reliable rather than flashy.
Why Join Portofino Technologies
This role offers direct exposure to live trading environments and real‑world market infrastructure challenges. You will have a tangible impact on trading robustness and scalability in a firm where technology and trading are deeply intertwined.
It is ideal for someone who wants ownership, autonomy, and the satisfaction of building systems that truly run themselves.