Principal Linux Platform Engineer - hybrid; Chicago, Kansas or NYC

Principal Linux Platform Engineer – Flexible Hybrid (Chicago, Kansas City or NYC)

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Job Description

Building trusted markets – powered by our people. At Cboe Global Markets, we inspire our people to solve complex challenges together because what we do matters. We provide the financial infrastructure that powers the global economy. As a leading provider of market infrastructure and tradable products, Cboe delivers cutting‑edge trading, clearing and investment solutions to market participants around the world.

We’re building meaningful ways to support professional and personal development while strengthening the trust we’ve earned as a global market leader. Our teams are empowered to share ideas, pursue them and bring on a challenge. As champions of internal mobility and access to opportunity, we encourage our people to “go for it” and equip our managers with the training to coach their teams to the next level.

Location Overview

Cboe HQ is located in the historic Old Post Office district, a landmark that blends classic architecture with modern amenities. The building features expansive spaces with high ceilings and large windows, offering abundant natural light and panoramic views of the city skyline and the Chicago River.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Linux Platform Engineer to lead the design, automation, and scalability of our global infrastructure that powers mission‑critical financial applications. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in Linux systems, Kubernetes orchestration, and modern development practices, and thrives in high‑performance, regulated environments.

As a senior technical leader, you will set architectural standards, mentor engineers, and drive platform reliability, observability, and security across hybrid cloud and on‑prem environments.

In this role you’ll be responsible for

• Design and evolve the firm’s container orchestration and compute platforms (Kubernetes, Incus/LXD, or hybrid systems) to support low‑latency, high‑availability financial applications.
• Define infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) standards (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and ensure consistent, auditable deployments across environments.
• Lead the adoption of immutable infrastructure principles, secure baseline images, and reproducible environments (RHEL‑based).
• Architect and implement CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployment with an emphasis on developer experience and velocity.
• Partner with development, SRE, and security teams to ensure regulatory compliance, change control, and observability across all layers.
• Establish monitoring, logging, and metrics strategies (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, Open Telemetry, etc.) for production and pre‑production systems.
• Drive performance tuning and capacity planning for large‑scale, latency‑sensitive services.
• Serve as a technical mentor and thought leader within the organization.
• Provide strategic input into infrastructure roadmap, vendor selection, and emerging technology evaluations.

The ideal candidate has

• 10+ years of professional experience in Linux systems engineering, ideally Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or derivatives.
• 5+ years of experience architecting and operating enterprise‑grade Kubernetes platforms, capable of influencing technical direction, setting engineering standards, and serving as the technical authority for our Kubernetes strategy; must have hands‑on experience deploying and managing clusters in bare‑metal and on‑premises environments (self‑managed or cloud‑native distributions such as EKS, GKE, or Open Shift).
• Strong proficiency with Python or Go for automation, tooling, and integration with APIs.
• Deep understanding of networking (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing) and security fundamentals (RBAC, TLS, secrets management).
• Expertise with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, Git Hub Actions, ArgoCD, Tekton, etc.) and artifact lifecycle management (Harbor, Pulp, or Artifactory).
• Proven experience with IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible/Salt Stack).
• Familiarity with container image lifecycle management, base image hardening, and…