Quantitative Hardware Researcher

Austin is home to Optiver’s main research, design and manufacturing facility for our custom trading system hardware. Fully understanding the components we use and the (exchange) environments in which our systems operate is critical to our success. We’re looking to expand the team with a quantitative researcher to help in hardware R&D.

With your quantitative skills and affinity for hardware, you’ll work with the engineers in the lab devising experiments, gathering data, running analysis and ultimately building an understanding of how things actually work. Using this knowledge to help to improve our designs, systems and the strategies that run upon them.

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 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.

Based in ‘The Domain’ neighborhood, Optiver’s Austin office serves as the firm’s innovation nucleus, with a strong focus on quantitative research, software, and hardware engineering initiatives. With tech innovation an integral part of our core business, the booming city proved an ideal backdrop for our heavy investment into systems, infrastructure, machine learning, big data and computing R&D efforts. What’s more, with world-class music, food and art scenes, as well as countless scenic outdoor activities, the quality of life for Austin Optiverians is second to none.

What you’ll do

You’ll be involved in a wide variety of tasks which focus around your quantitative skills and understanding of hardware. This is just a few of the things you’ll do:

• Design, build and run experiments to characterize hardware such as switches, routers and trading systems at picosecond scales.
• Work with execution researchers at all of our offices to understand real world vs lab performance of our trading systems and strategies.
• Work with our software engineers in the lab to scale out and automate your research such that we can apply it at a global scale.
• Be part of designing the next generation of systems and strategies which take your findings into account.
• Your experience with lab measurements makes you a valuable resource for anyone looking at production data or trying to improve our production captures.
• Help run the lab, make sure we have everything we need to run upcoming experiments and manage the queue of work.
• Be involved with suppliers to test and understand next generation systems and measurement equipment.

The role is on-site at our Domain office. We believe that our best work is done together and being in same location gives significant communication advantages, especially for creative and complex work with a hands-on component like this.

Who you are

The ideal candidate combines a strong quantitative background with a deep understanding of hardware and can combine both of these skills to drive analysis that helps us improve our designs and strategies.

• You have a strong understanding of quantitative analysis methods and have the ability to present findings to others.
• You are grounded in physical reality; you have an understanding of how hardware works and have the ability to use this knowledge to form hypothesis, conduct physical experiments and draw conclusions from that.
• You are comfortable working with Python and Jupyter notebooks.
• You’re not afraid to be hands on in a datacenter lab environment.
• Programming experience in low level languages such as C/C++ or VHDL is a strong plus.
• Experience with (low-latency) networks and related hardware is a strong plus.
• An educational background in Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Computer Science, or similar (Masters/PhD preferred)
• A preference for working collaboratively with like-minded people.
• A passion for solving problems and a drive for results

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 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.