Research Engineer

Optiver’s Futures Trading team is looking for Research Engineers to build our large-scale research infrastructure. This infrastructure will facilitate an active machine learning pipeline for feature engineering, modelling, back-testing, and simulation. Research Engineers collaborate with traders and researchers as thought partners to develop, evaluate, and optimize new pricing features for model training and matching engine algorithms to mirror production behavior. The work of the Research Engineer intersects closely with a homegrown, highly parallelized compute cluster fed by terabytes of data that service the research pipeline as well as the nanosecond-latency trading systems that ultimately monetize them, and so the Research Engineer will consider, influence, and even contribute directly to these other domains.

Technology at Optiver:

At Optiver we pride ourselves on being real engineers, not just coders. Our engineers work closely with traders to identify the business problems we face and determine how they should be solved. We apply a disciplined and scientific approach. We engineer simple, well-architected solutions that meet the dynamic needs of our traders. Our passion is to solve problems which really matter to the business, and we take pride in the quality of our solutions.

What you’ll do:

• Collaborate with senior researchers, traders and technologists to research new ideas, tackle complex problems, and deliver appropriate solutions
• Design, develop, support, and maintain large portions of our research and trading infrastructure
• Establish vision and technical direction for major initiatives
• Contribute to the Optiver stack and our pricing, research and trading models from ideation through to implementation
• Ensure new and existing programs adhere to our coding, architectural, and operational standards
• Develop a deep understanding of trading and exchanges
• Engineer and refine new scientific approaches alongside the deployment of our research platforms and technologies
• Cross technological domains to consider and challenge all dimensions of the problem at hand without fear of artificial silos of information and ownership

What you’ll need:

• Strong engineering instincts and a deep understanding of computer science fundamentals
• Experience in statistical modelling, mathematics or related domains
• An ability to generate research ideas and implement and execute solutions to represent them
• Innovative, big-picture thinking grounded in real-world pragmatism
• A desire to continuously improve in a rapidly evolving environment
• A readiness to set technical direction, promote engineering principles, and do the right thing
• Experience with either C, C++, Python, Linux is preferred
• Experience with GPUs, FPGAs is interesting but by no means essential
• No financial experience is required, but a desire to work for a tier-one market maker that maintains strong relationships with the exchanges we trade on, is.

Who we are:

Optiver is a leading proprietary trading firm using technology to provide the most up-to-date and competitive prices in financial products around the world. Put simply, we improve the markets. Achieving this requires excellence in everything we do. That’s not merely an aspiration, but our reason for being.

We’re seeking people who up the ante with nerve, with guts and, most importantly, with heart. We’re looking for the bold. Does that describe you? Then opt in.

Please note, this is for experienced applications only. If you're interested in graduate and intern positions, please instead apply to our 2023 Graduate Software Engineer or 2023 Software Engineer Intern opportunties.