Site Reliability Engineer
US$180,000 – US$200,000 / yr base salary
Posted 8 Sep 2026
Advertised as “Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Linux Systems & Application Observability”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- Hybrid
| Base salary | US$180,000 – US$200,000 / yr |
|---|---|
| Cash bonus | US$27,000 – US$40,000 |
| Total comp | US$207,000 – US$240,000 |
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.