Infrastructure Developer

Squarepoint Capital's Infrastructure Services team is responsible for engineering the foundational services that power one of the world's leading quantitative investment firms. Our infrastructure spans global datacenters across AMER, EMEA, and APAC, encompassing bare metal compute, high-performance networking (Spine/Leaf, VXLAN/EVPN), GPU clusters, distributed storage (Weka, Vast), cloud (GCP/AWS), and a growing portfolio of platform services (Kubernetes, Slurm, Knative). We are seeking a hands-on Infrastructure Developer — a software engineer at heart who specializes in infrastructure automation through deep, programmatic integration of service-level APIs. This is not a traditional infrastructure operations role. You will write production-quality code every day, designing and building the API fabric that connects our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to every layer of the infrastructure stack: physical sites, datacenter fabric, network, compute, storage, and cloud. This role is central to our multi-year strategy to eliminate 90% of manual infrastructure operations by 2027 through self-service, API-driven automation at every exposed layer of the stack. You will be the technical owner of the interaction model between our source of truth (CMDB) and the systems that act on it — from bare metal provisioning pipelines to network fabric configuration, from cloud resource management to workload scheduler integration.

Position Overview

API Design & Ownership Across the Infrastructure Stack

You are the design authority for the API interaction model spanning all infrastructure domains:

• Bare Metal & Provisioning: API integration with provisioning systems to drive automated server lifecycle — from hardware discovery and BIOS configuration through OS installation, burn-in, and production handover. Target: zero human touchpoints in the provisioning pipeline.
• Network Fabric: API-driven configuration of Arista EOS VXLAN/EVPN environments — automating VTEP registration, VNI/VRF assignment, switch port configuration, and VLAN management. Cycle time target: < 1 minute for basic operations with no humans in the loop.
• Virtualization & Cloud: API integration with cloud providers (GCP, AWS) and on-premises virtualization platforms, enabling consistent resource lifecycle management across hybrid environments.
• Storage: API-driven management of file, block, and object storage services (Weka, Vast, S3-compatible) — including volume provisioning, replication policy, data lifecycle, and performance tier assignment.
• CMDB as Source of Truth: Own the enterprise CMDB API layer — a FastAPI microservices architecture (CI API, Fabric API, Bare Metal API) backed by PostgreSQL, deployed on Kubernetes/Knative — ensuring it is the authoritative, real-time source of truth for all infrastructure configuration items and their relationships.

Infrastructure Automation Engineering

• Design and implement end-to-end automation pipelines that eliminate manual handoffs between teams (e.g., server provisioning → network configuration → storage attachment → scheduler registration).
• Build event-driven workflows using Knative/Eventing and similar platforms to propagate infrastructure state changes across dependent systems automatically.
• Develop self-service interfaces (APIs, CLIs, internal developer portals) that delegate routine infrastructure operations to appropriate stakeholders — enabling teams to manage their own resources within defined policy guardrails without requiring Infrastructure team intervention.
• Implement policy-as-code integrations: translating high-level security and segmentation policies (Illumio, Cilium, firewall rules) into programmatic enforcement through the CMDB and automation layer.

API Engineering Triage & Initiative Scoping

• Lead API engineering triage: evaluate, scope, and validate new automation initiatives across the infrastructure stack.
• Work with product teams, vendors, and business stakeholders to understand service catalogs, planned vendor changes, and business priorities — translating them into API integration requirements.
• Allocate and coordinate implementation work across teams, ensuring the right problems are solved at the right abstraction level.
• Maintain a vendor API roadmap: track API capabilities and planned changes across all infrastructure vendors (Arista, Weka, Vast, RackN, MAAS, GCP, AWS, Equinix, etc.) and proactively plan integrations.

CMDB Schema Design & Data Modeling

• Own the evolving CMDB data model — designing schemas that capture the past, current, and future state of infrastructure across all layers (physical, network, compute, storage, cloud, application).
• Ensure the CMDB schema is tolerant of evolution: new CI types, relationship types, and attributes must be addable without breaking existing consumers.
• Model topological relationships between infrastructure components: rack → server → network port → switch → fabric → VNI/VRF → application workload.
• Integrate and subsume existing sources of truth (SIM, SIAM, Netbox, firewall rule databases, Ansible inventory, Illumio segmentation model) into the unified CMDB model over time.
• Design CI versioning and audit trails to support compliance, change management, and root cause analysis.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Technical Leadership

• Build close working relationships with global infrastructure leads across Platform, Network, Storage, Cloud, and Security teams — as well as with application teams (Trading, Research, Development) and their business stakeholders.
• Serve as the technical bridge between infrastructure engineering and the broader Technology organization: from hardware provisioning teams to workload schedulers (Kubernetes, Slurm) to VDI and end-user services.
• Collaborate with Cybersecurity to implement identity-based, federated security policy enforcement through the API and automation layer — moving away from IP-based, manually managed firewall rules toward programmatic, application-aware policy.
• Contribute to the Infrastructure Platform Direction strategy, particularly the principle that infrastructure should be generated from a high-level description of need at the highest abstraction layer possible.

The Technical Environment

• You will work across a rich and complex infrastructure stack:
• Physical Sites (L1): Global DCs + cloud regions; Colo
• Datacenter Architecture (L2): Rack standardization, GPU/compute/storage rack types, physical placement rules
• Network & Connectivity (L3): Arista EOS, Spine/Leaf, VXLAN/EVPN, BGP/ECMP, RoCE, Illumio, Cilium, multi-site DCI
• Compute & Storage (L4): Bare metal (Intel/AMD/GPU/FPGA), RackN, MAAS, Weka, Vast, NVMe/TCP, iSCSI, S3
• Schedulers (L5): Kubernetes (GKE + on-prem), Slurm, Knative, Nomad
• Runtime (L6): Spinux (standardized Linux), containers, GPU runtime, HashiVault
• CMDB / API Platform: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Pydantic v2, Knative Eventing, Python
• Cloud: GCP (primary), AWS; BigQuery, GKE, cloud storage, Sagemaker Hyperpod
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Loki, Akvorado
• Source Control & CI/CD: GitLab, Jira, Confluence

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 10+ years of experience in software development, with a strong focus on infrastructure automation, systems integration, or platform engineering.
• Production-quality Python development: you write clean, tested, maintainable Python code as a core part of your daily work. Experience with FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Pydantic, and async Python is highly valued.
• API design expertise: deep experience designing RESTful APIs, including resource modeling, versioning strategies, pagination, error handling, and OpenAPI/Swagger documentation.
• Schema and data modeling: proven experience designing relational database schemas (PostgreSQL preferred) for complex, evolving domains — including normalization, indexing, and schema migration strategies.
• Infrastructure domain knowledge: working understanding of at least two of the following domains — bare metal provisioning, network configuration (switching/routing), storage systems, virtualization, or cloud infrastructure.
• Systems integration experience: demonstrated track record of integrating heterogeneous systems via APIs — consuming vendor APIs, building abstraction layers, and managing API lifecycle across multiple upstream dependencies.
• Strong verbal and written communication: ability to translate complex technical concepts for both engineering peers and non-technical business stakeholders; comfortable presenting to senior leadership.
• Strong analytical and organizational skills: able to scope ambiguous problems, decompose them into actionable work, and drive execution across multiple teams.
• Experience with the Atlassian stack (Jira, Confluence) and Git (GitLab) — including using these tools for project tracking, documentation, and code review workflows.

Nice to have:

• Experience with CMDB platforms: hands-on experience with enterprise CMDB vendors or open-source alternatives (ServiceNow, Netbox, Ralph, Device42, or similar) — including data model design, API integration, and migration from legacy sources of truth.
• Network automation experience: familiarity with network device APIs (Arista EOS, NAPALM, Netmiko, RESTCONF/NETCONF) and network automation frameworks.
• Kubernetes and cloud-native development: experience deploying and operating microservices on Kubernetes, including Knative, Helm, and GitOps workflows.
• Event-driven architecture: experience with event streaming platforms (Kafka, Knative Eventing, NATS) for building reactive infrastructure automation pipelines.
• Working knowledge of Rust: for performance-critical automation components or CLI tooling.
• Experience in financial services or other latency-sensitive environments: understanding of the operational rigor, change management discipline, and reliability requirements of production trading infrastructure.
• Security automation: experience integrating with microsegmentation platforms (Illumio, Cilium) or implementing policy-as-code for network security.
• Infrastructure-as-Code familiarity: experience with Terraform, Ansible, or similar IaC tools — and critically, an informed perspective on where IaC patterns are appropriate versus where a CMDB-driven API model is superior.

The minimum base salary for this role is $100,000 if located in New York. This expectation is based on available information at the time of posting. This role may be eligible for discretionary bonuses, which could constitute a significant portion of total compensation. This role may also be eligible for benefits, such as health, dental, and other wellness plans, as well as 401(k) contributions. Successful candidates’ compensation and benefits will be determined in consideration of various factors.