Principal System Engineer in London

A highly successful, technology-driven global alternative investment manager is seeking a world-class Principal Systems Engineer to join its core Systems group in either New York or London. In this senior individual contributor (IC) role, you will not simply maintain legacy infrastructure. You will own the strategic evolution, architectural design, and hands-on execution of our next-generation virtualisation and storage platforms. We are looking for a Linux-first systems expert who moves past the GUI to build, automate, and scale low-level virtualisation platforms. If you are frustrated by bureaucratic environments and want the autonomy to transition a mature production environment away from legacy hypervisors toward modern, open-source architectures, this role is built for you.

What You'll Do Day-to-Day

• Architect the Future State: Lead the technical exploration, proof-of-concept (PoC) engineering, and long-term strategy to evolve the firm’s core virtualisation fabric away from traditional vendors (evaluating alternatives such as KVM-based solutions, Proxmox, and Linux-native approaches).
• Hands-on Migration & Execution: Design and personally execute complex, low-risk virtualisation and storage migrations for high-performance production workloads.
• Systems Programming & Automation: Develop production-grade infrastructure tooling, APIs, and provisioning frameworks to maximise platform reliability, and operational scalability.
• Platform Optimisation: Own and maintain current production virtualisation clusters and enterprise software-defined storage solutions, ensuring peak performance, resource allocation, and kernel-level optimisation.
• Technical Leadership: Act as the ultimate subject matter expert for virtualisation across the global technology group, collaborating with cross-functional systems and engineering teams.

Who We Are Looking For

• Deep Linux & Virtualisation Expertise: At least 10 years of experience architecting, scaling, and troubleshooting large-scale production virtualisation environments. You possess deep technical empathy for the Linux kernel, namespaces, cgroups, and libvirt.
• Alternative Hypervisor Pioneers: Advanced, production-level expertise in KVM-based platforms, Proxmox, or native QEMU environments. You have a proven track record of migrating substantial enterprise workloads away from VMware/Hyper-V.
• Modern Storage Engineers: Deep familiarity with enterprise storage fabrics, SAN protocols, and at least one major software-defined storage (SDS) platform (e.g., Ceph, ZFS, LVM).
• Code-Driven Infrastructure Mindset: Strong, production-grade programming capability in Python or Go (alternatively, deep PowerShell and .NET expertise). You write software to manage hardware and view configuration management/orchestration as code.
• True Authors, Not Participants: You can point to massive modernisation initiatives where you were the primary architectural designer and implementation engineer, not just a participant or coordinator.
• Intellectual Honesty: Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the confidence to ask hard questions, acknowledge technical gaps, and own large-scale, ambiguous initiatives from conception to delivery.
• Degree Preference: A Bachelor’s or advanced degree (Master's/PhD) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related technical/quantitative discipline is highly preferred.

Why Join Us?

• Pure Strategic Impact: This is a newly created, highly visible initiative with zero legacy people‑management overhead. You will have full ownership over the technical roadmap.
• Technology-First Culture: Work alongside elite engineers in an environment that values intellectual curiosity, rigorous engineering practices, and data‑driven decision‑making.
• Exceptional Autonomy: We strip away the red tape to let principal engineers focus entirely on solving complex, low-level technical challenges with the funding and resources required to succeed.