Linux Systems Engineer

Our Linux Team ensures our trading servers work so we can trade. You will work in a highly-customized environment where proprietary tools and technology run. You will be expected to help build the pioneering tools to keep our systems best-in-class while enabling our technology evolution in a controlled way.

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 50+ exchanges across the globe. Our mission is to constantly improve the market by injecting liquidity, providing accurate pricing, increasing transparency and acting as a stabilizing 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:

Our Linux Systems Engineers are a key cog in the Optiver machine, ensuring that our production environment works optimally by deploying, maintaining, monitoring and operating a fleet of UNIX servers, which are predominantly bare-metal:

• Tackle the life cycle of a server and build and deploy new solutions
• Performance monitoring and managing the system capacity
• Fix and analyze technical incidents, solve technical ad hoc problems
• Lead our charge to intelligent automation
• Be the connection between hardware and software
• Research new technologies and solutions, implement them or build better

Who you are:

• A Linux Admin meets SRE/Programming mindset to help build the right tools for our continual improvement
• Experience within a high-performance computer environment where the result matters
• Some focus on automating and solid scripting skills (ideally Python)
• Infrastructure-as-Code with an Ansible flavor
• Understand how and where to kill snowflakes
• Knowledge of virtualization and networking, experience with cloud providers as AWS or Azure preferred
• A proactive approach to problem solving
• High attention to detail coupled with strong communication skills
• The ability to multitask and handle priorities in collaboration with other teams

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.