Quality Engineer, Data Center Operations

Job description

**The Firm** XTX Markets is a leading algorithmic trading firm which uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 53,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, and crypto. It uses those forecasts to trade on exchanges and alternative trading venues, and to offer differentiated liquidity directly to clients worldwide. The firm trades over USD $250bn a day across 35 countries and has over 300 employees based in London, Singapore, New York, Paris, Bristol, Mumbai, Yerevan and Kajaani. We leverage the talent of our team, modern computational techniques, and state-of-the-art research infrastructure to analyse large data sets across markets quickly and efficiently, maximizing the effectiveness of our proprietary trading algorithms. We are actively seeking new methods and ideas. The models that drive our trading strategies have evolved considerably over the last 10 years, from econometric methods that gave our company its name, to trees, to neural networks, to modern deep learning architectures. XTX Markets has an unrivalled level of computational resources in the trading industry, with a growing research cluster currently containing over 25,000 GPUs with more than 1 exabyte of usable storage. Teams across the firm include world-class researchers, developers and technologists with backgrounds in pure math, programming, physics, computer science and machine learning. The firm is also constructing a large-scale data centre in Finland to future-proof its significant computational capabilities. At XTX Markets, technology is our business, and we are a diverse organization which attracts outstanding talent from across all industry backgrounds. We are focused on teamwork, and our people collaborate on all aspects of the business, working openly and with respect for each other, our clients and the market. Our culture is non-hierarchical and one where everyone is valued. We strive for excellence in everything we do. **The Role** The Quality Engineer, Data Center Operations is responsible for ensuring operational excellence, reliability, quality assurance and continuous improvement across data center operations. The role establishes and maintains effective quality-management practices, monitors operational performance, supports the transition of new infrastructure into live operations, drives corrective actions and lessons learned, and supports compliance with applicable national and European Union legislation, regulations and standards. Working closely with data center operations, engineering, environmental, health and safety, security, sustainability, legal, and management teams, the Quality Engineer ensures that operational processes are consistently documented, measured, controlled, challenged and improved. **Operational Quality Management** - Develop, implement, and maintain an effective and proportionate quality-management framework for data center operations. - Ensure that operational procedures, including MOPs, SOPs and EOPs, work instructions, control measures, and technical documentation are accurate, consistent, and up to date. - Monitor compliance with approved operational processes, service requirements, quality standards, and internal policies. - Conduct regular operational quality reviews, inspections, process assessments, and internal audits. - Identify quality-related risks, process gaps, recurring incidents and alarms, and improvement opportunities. - Support operational readiness activities, including commissioning, handover and transition of new or expanded data center infrastructure into live operations. - Monitor supply-chain partners and on-site contractors to ensure adherence to quality benchmarks and agreed operational standards. - Review the quality and effectiveness of maintenance activities and operational change-management processes. **Regulatory Compliance and Reporting** - Work with Legal and other relevant functions to understand applicable national and European Union regulatory requirements affecting data center operations. - Translate applicable regulatory requirements into practical operational controls, procedures, reporting processes, and evidence requirements in conjunction with the relevant functional owners. - Coordinate and assure the quality, completeness and timely provision of data required for statutory, regulatory, sustainability, environmental, energy-efficiency, and operational reporting, with accountability for individual submissions remaining with the relevant functional owner. - Maintain a structured register of applicable regulations, reporting obligations, responsible owners, deadlines, and supporting evidence. - Ensure that operational reporting and supporting data are accurate, complete, traceable, and provided within the required timeframes. **Performance Monitoring and Data Quality** - Define, collect, validate, and filter operational data from multiple data center systems and sources. - Define, maintain, and develop operational quality metrics, key performance indicators, and reporting dashboards. - Coordinate reporting tools implementation projects. - Monitor operational performance in areas such as availability, reliability, incidents, maintenance, alarms, energy efficiency, environmental performance, capacity, service quality, and corrective actions. - Prepare regular quality and operational-performance reports for site management and other stakeholders. - Provide management with clear analysis, findings, risks, and recommendations based on operational data and performance trends. **Incident Management and Corrective Actions** - Support the investigation of operational incidents, quality deviations, process failures, and non-conformities. - Facilitate or participate in root-cause analyses using appropriate quality and problem-solving methods. - Coordinate corrective and preventive actions and ensure that agreed actions are assigned, documented, implemented, and verified. - Monitor recurring incidents and alarms and systemic issues to identify opportunities for long-term improvement. - Maintain records of incidents, audit findings, non-conformities, corrective actions, and lessons learned. - Support the effective communication and implementation of lessons learned across relevant operational teams and other XTX data centers. **Continuous Improvement** - Promote a culture of operational excellence, accountability, standardisation, and continuous improvement. - Lead or support improvement initiatives that increase operational reliability, efficiency, compliance, safety, and service quality. - Use operational data, audits, incidents, and stakeholder feedback to prioritise improvement activities. - Share best practices and help embed improved processes into day-to-day operations and standardise effective practices across XTX data centers. - Proactively challenge existing processes and ways of working where data, incidents or operational experience indicate that a safer, more reliable or more efficient approach is available. **Documentation and Change Control** - Maintain effective document-control and records-management practices for operational documentation. - Review procedures, MOPs, SOPs, EOPs, reports, risk assessments, operating instructions, and quality records. - Ensure that documents have clear ownership, approval, version control, review dates, and retention requirements. - Participate in operational change-management processes and assess the quality, compliance, reporting, reliability, operational risk and documentation impacts of proposed changes. - Verify that operational changes are appropriately assessed, approved, communicated, implemented, tested where appropriate, and documented. **Role Objective** The objective of the role is to provide management and operational teams with reliable assurance that data center operations are controlled, compliant, measurable, reliable and continuously improving. The Quality Engineer helps ensure that the organization can demonstrate operational excellence through accurate data, effective processes, robust documentation, timely reporting, and verifiable evidence. The role is expected to actively identify weaknesses and improvement opportunities, challenge existing practices where appropriate, and use operational data, incidents and lessons learned to drive measurable improvements in reliability and operational performance across XTX's data centers. **Essential Qualifications & Experience** - Bachelor’s or master’s degree in engineering, quality management, industrial management, information technology, energy, environmental management, or another relevant field. - Relevant professional experience in quality engineering, operational excellence, compliance, technical reporting, or continuous improvement within a mission-critical or highly regulated operational environment. - Experience in data centers, critical infrastructure, energy, telecommunications, utilities, industrial facilities, or another highly regulated operational environment is strongly preferred. - Demonstrated experience in operational performance measurement, internal auditing, incident/root-cause investigation and corrective-action management. - Experience with quality-management systems and recognised management-system standards is an advantage. - Understanding of critical infrastructure operations, operational risk, business continuity, energy efficiency, environmental performance, and information security is beneficial. - Experience working with operational data, reporting tools, dashboards, maintenance-management systems, or document-management systems is preferred. - Proficient in English and at least B1 (intermediate) level in Finnish.