How Jump Trading provides access at scale to their global workforce

What is Jump Trading?

Jump Trading is a research-based trading firm that serves as a market maker enabling stocks, bonds and currencies. It was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The firm is known for its expertise in high-frequency trading and has a significant presence in global financial markets.

Jump Trading manages both on-prem and cloud computing infrastructure used for trading and analytics. There is a wide range of users at Jump from including people with scientific and engineering backgrounds and those who are familiar with high performance computing. They accommodate different access patterns and the challenges that can arise when transitioning from tools like OpenSSH, and X11 to access nodes with Teleport.

Philosophy of Access

Jump Trading has implemented multiple access control mechanisms, such as RBAC (Role Based Access Controls) and ABAC (Attribute based Access Control), and uses Slack channels and advocates to help with onboarding and to build an internal community of users helping each other with Teleport.

At Jump Trading scale there are multiple challenges of managing access at scale. Jump Trading have built up internal advocates who are knowledgeable about the use of Teleport and can help their colleagues with any issues or questions that may arise. This has been an efficient way to scale and smooth onboarding and usage of Teleport at an organizational level.

Auditing Access

Jump Trading has leveraged auditing and sending logs to a centralized system to better understand behaviors of access.

Access as code

Jump Trading has implemented a pull model for RBAC, and stresses the importance of using a repository to manage access control policies in large systems. They recommend using a tool like Terraform or an in-house code to keep a written record of the access patterns in the system and to go through a review process to ensure accuracy. Jump Trading uses scripts to commit changes to Teleport and the use of webhooks to pull changes from the repository.

Managing access at scale can be challenging, particularly due to the unique access patterns of different teams and individuals. To address this, JumpTrading has implemented just-in-time access and is considering building their own DSL on top of Teleport using Predicate.