HFT FX DevOps: Infrastructure Engineer – Contract in London

Wagglyn is looking for an experienced HFT DevOps: infrastructure engineer to work with the existing engineering team on the deployment, operation and production readiness of a low-latency FX trading platform. This is a hands-on contract role for someone who has worked with real production infrastructure, HFT systems, data-centre deployments or high-availability backend platforms. It is not a generic cloud-only DevOps role.

Scope

• The contractor will help prepare, operate and support the infrastructure required to run Wagglyn’s MVP trading stack across our production sites, cloud/UAT environments and interim infrastructure.
• The role will involve working with the engineering team to document the current environment, define deployment and access processes, support the migration from interim to physical infrastructure, and put in place the monitoring, runbooks and controls needed for production operation.

Profile

• Senior hands-on contractor.
• Able to take ownership of evolving infrastructure and shape it into a clear, supportable operating model.
• Must be comfortable with both physical infrastructure and cloud/UAT environments.
• Must be able to document, automate, monitor and troubleshoot production services.
• Not suitable for someone who only wants to build greenfield cloud infrastructure or only manage CI/CD pipelines without touching servers, networks and live systems.
• Complete server/process inventory across all production, cloud/UAT and interim environments.
• Confirm which services need to move to the target physical infrastructure.
• Produce an interim-to-physical infrastructure migration plan.
• Define restart, rollback and recovery procedures for critical services.
• Confirm access model and SSH key management across all environments.
• Document current and target network paths.
• Add basic monitoring and alerting for critical services.
• Confirm QuestDB / market-data capture operational checks.
• Create runbooks for service failure, deployment failure, market-data issues and connectivity issues.
• Support the move towards an MVP-ready production operating model.

Areas of Focus

• Physical server readiness across production sites.
• Interim-to-physical infrastructure migration.
• Deployment and rollback processes.
• CI/CD pipeline setup and improvement.
• Environment configuration management.
• Secrets management.
• SSH key and access control.
• Service monitoring and alerting.
• Network and firewall documentation.
• Market-data capture and QuestDB operational support.
• Fix-engine and trading-service deployment support.
• UAT and production environment readiness.
• Runbooks and operational procedures.
• Incident response and recovery processes.
• Server/process inventory and ownership documentation.

The platform is moving from an interim setup spread across cloud/UAT and transitional infrastructure towards a more controlled MVP production setup on dedicated physical infrastructure. The contractor should help make this transition operationally safe by ensuring we know what runs where, how services are deployed, how they are monitored, how failures are recovered, and how access is controlled. The immediate focus is not to overbuild a large platform. The priority is to create a practical MVP operating model that supports reliable deployment, observability, troubleshooting and migration.

Required Experience

• Operating production backend systems.
• Deployment automation and rollback processes.
• CI/CD pipelines.
• Docker and/or systemd service management.
• AWS – particularly EC2, IAM, SSM and Secrets Manager.
• SSH key management and access control.
• Monitoring, alerting and logging.
• Network troubleshooting and firewall documentation.
• Creating runbooks and operational procedures.
• Comfortable working with existing infrastructure and incomplete documentation.
• Able to work directly with engineers to understand services and production risks.

Preferred Experience

• Trading systems or financial-services infrastructure.
• FIX engine or market-data infrastructure.
• Low-latency or high-throughput systems.
• QuestDB or time-series database operations.
• Rust, Java or backend service deployment.
• VPN / WireGuard / private network setup.
• UAT to production promotion workflows.
• Observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch or Datadog.

Contract Structure

• Immediate start preferred.
• Strong preference for candidates who are immediately available.

About Wagglyn

Wagglyn is a bespoke FX consultancy mandated by a single-family office to develop and implement a systematic total return strategy in foreign exchange markets. We are building an institutional-grade algorithmic FX trading capability, combining quantitative research and high-performance engineering.