Graduate Trading Operations Engineer (2023 Start - Chicago)

Who we are:

Optiver is a tech-driven trading firm and leading global market maker. As one of the oldest market making institutions, we are a trusted partner of 70+ exchanges across the globe. Our mission is to constantly improve the market by injecting liquidity, providing accurate pricing, increasing transparency and acting as a stabilising force no matter the market conditions. With a focus on continuous improvement, we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets for everyone who participates.

Optiver Chicago’s culture parallels the energetic city we’re immersed in. Home to the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Board Options Exchange, and Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago has established itself as the trading capital of the US. Active on leading US exchanges, Optiver’s Chicago office trades a wide range of products from listed derivatives to cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign exchange.

What you’ll do:

The Trading Operations Engineering team is the steward of our trading systems, balancing a safe, orderly production environment with profitability and sustainable growth.

Our responsibility is to stay ahead of the inherent complexity in scaling a distributed system that handles over half a million correlated financial instruments across multiple data centers and thousands of servers -- all the while striving for simplicity, dependability, and operational excellence.

We understand the full breadth of all production systems, including how they interconnect and interact, and use this knowledge to deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, and scale up our trading infrastructure. We work with traders, development teams, and operations team to coordinate and influence improvements to our systems.

You can expect to:

• Deploy, monitor, and configure a suite of proprietary trading applications
• Provide technical expertise and support to a high frequency trading floor in a competitive market-making environment
• Develop fluency with existing systems, infrastructure, and procedures, and proactively work to improve them
• Continually drive production systems toward cleanliness, simplicity, and reliability
• Work with development to ensure the health and stability of the production trading environment
• Intelligently automate while maintaining firm human control
• Script against configuration files, databases, and logs
• Track and solve issues as part of a fast-paced results driven set of IT teams

Who you are:

• Graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in CS or other STEM field
• Have an expected graduation date between December 2022 and June 2023
• Experience scripting (python preferred)
• Interest in operating systems and network architectures
• Ability to learn quickly and autonomously
• Attention to detail, diligence, and a high personal bar for performance expectations
• Strong communication, organizational, and analytical skills
• Knowledge of the trading and finance industries is not required
• Legal authorization to work in the U.S. is required; we will not sponsor individuals for employment authorization for this job opening

What you’ll get:

• Work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 40 different countries.
• Performance based bonus structure that is unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool fostering a truly collaborative environment to work in.
• Ownership over initiatives that directly solve business problems.  

Alongside this you will get great other benefits such as 25 paid vacation days and market holidays, fully paid commuting expenses and health insurance, daily breakfast and lunch, training opportunities, 401(k) match up to 50% and charitable match opportunities, regular social events and clubs, and many more.

*We accept one application per role per year. If you have previously applied to the Trading Operations Engineer position during this season and have been unsuccessful, you can reapply once the next recruitment season begins in 2023.