Principal Manager/Associate Director, Tech (QS Dev) – Core Tech
D. E. Shaw
Hyderabadonsiteseniorfull timeToday
D. E. Shaw
We are seeking an experienced engineering leader to join our QS Dev team in Hyderabad as a Principal Manager / Associate Director. QS Dev – Core Tech is a specialized technology group responsible for developing and supporting the computing infrastructure that underpins the D. E. Shaw group’s quantitative trading and research. The team builds and maintains a broad portfolio of mission-critical systems — including HPC schedulers and orchestration, service management, container and environment management, GPU compute infrastructure, high-performance networking, distributed storage, and Linux platform engineering — to support both on-premises and cloud-based computer environments. QS Dev partners closely with quantitative researchers to design, implement, and optimize scalable technology that serves as the foundation for many of the firm’s most sophisticated trading strategies and analytics. In this role, you will lead a team of 10–15 engineers and serve as both a people leader and a subject-matter expert in distributed systems and platform engineering. You will be expected to balance hands-on technical leadership — including architecture reviews, design guidance, and code-level engagement where necessary — with the stakeholder management, operational rigor, and team-building responsibilities that define a high-performing engineering organization.
Responsibilities:
This role involves leading and developing a team of 10–15 engineers, directly and through technical leads, while fostering a culture of ownership, intellectual rigor, and collaborative problem-solving. The leader will be responsible for performance management, promotion readiness, and career development, with a focus on identifying and cultivating future technical leaders. They will raise the technical bar by challenging skilled engineers to deepen their craft, sharpen their design instincts, deliver elegant and production-grade solutions to complex infrastructure problems, and expand their impact across the team’s systems. The role also requires creating an environment where engineers are empowered to make decisions, take calculated risks, and learn from failures through blameless retrospectives. From a technical leadership and architecture perspective, the role requires setting the technical direction and architectural standards for a broad portfolio of infrastructure systems, including compute orchestration and scheduling, environment and package management, GPU compute and high-performance computing, distributed storage, networking infrastructure, Linux platform engineering, virtualization, cloud and hybrid compute environments, SDLC tooling, CI/CD, and developer productivity infrastructure. The leader will drive architecture reviews and design discussions to ensure systems are reliable, performant, secure, and operable at scale, while remaining technically engaged through design and code reviews, critical-path decision-making, and debugging complex cross-system issues with the team. They will also define and enforce SLOs, operational runbooks, and incident-response protocols, lead capacity planning and resource optimization across compute, storage, and network infrastructure, evaluate emerging technologies and open-source tools through proof-of-concept assessments, and promote platform engineering best practices, architectural patterns, and technology standards across the organization through documentation, design reviews, and hands-on support.
Who we're looking for:
The ideal candidate should hold-
Basic Qualifications:
The ideal candidate is a technically deep engineering manager who combines expertise in distributed systems and infrastructure engineering with a demonstrated ability to lead, develop, and hold accountable a team of high-caliber engineers in a demanding, performance-sensitive environment.
10–15 years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 3–4 years in an engineering management role leading teams of 10 or more engineers
Robust programming expertise in one or more of Go, Rust, or Python, with the technical depth to conduct meaningful architecture and code reviews, and to make sound build-versus-buy decisions
Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems — particularly compute orchestration, job scheduling, container platforms, or infrastructure comparable in complexity to Kubernetes, Borg, Mesos, or similar systems
Proven track record in platform engineering or software infrastructure — building the foundational systems that other engineers and researchers depend on for development, build, deployment, and production operations
Solid background in computing-heavy or high-performance computing environments, with working knowledge across the infrastructure stack (compute, storage, networking, GPUs)
Experience defining and operating against service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) for mission-critical infrastructure
The ability to manage cross-functional stakeholders, negotiate competing priorities, and communicate technical strategy and trade-offs to both engineering and business audiences
Track record of hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers — building cohesive teams that consistently deliver reliable infrastructure in production
Expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and distributed data systems (Kafka, ZooKeeper) in production environments
Observability and reliability mindset: hands-on experience establishing monitoring, alerting, tracing, on-call rotations, and incident-response practices (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or similar)
Security-conscious approach to infrastructure: familiarity with Linux system hardening, access controls, network segmentation, and compliance-aware development practices
Excellent problem-solving and critical-thinking abilities, with a bias for action and a track record of making pragmatic decisions under ambiguity.
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with HPC schedulers (Slurm, PBS, or proprietary schedulers), large-scale batch orchestration, or computer resource management at the scale of thousands of nodes
Familiarity with Nix, reproducible build systems, or developer-environment tooling (Flox, Bazel, or similar)
Experience with GPU compute infrastructure (CUDA, MPI, performance profiling) or high-performance storage systems (GPFS, parallel file systems, SAN, network-attached storage)
Background in high-performance networking — RDMA fabrics, multicast, DWDM, or low-latency network engineering
Experience at quantitative trading firms, high-frequency trading firms, or organizations with similarly demanding latency, uptime, and correctness requirements
Experience with capacity planning, infrastructure cost optimization, and resource-allocation strategy for compute-intensive workloads
Experience managing infrastructure that supports both on-premises data centers and public cloud (GCP, AWS), including hybrid-environment operational patterns
Familiarity with containers (Docker, Podman), Kubernetes, or similar container orchestration platforms in production
Experience establishing or maturing engineering processes — CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, release management, and change-control practices for infrastructure
Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects or a record of building widely adopted internal platform tools
Exposure to business continuity planning, disaster recovery, and data-center operations in a financial service or similarly regulated context
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