Trading Operations Engineer

Optiver’s Trading Operations Engineer acts as a steward of our trading systems, balancing a safe, orderly production environment with profitability and sustainable growth. Every single day, they find new ways to ensure our trading teams can operate successfully, efficiently and without interruptions.

As part of our trading operations control function, they are also vital in making sure technical issues are tackled quickly, new configuration rolled out effectively, and expansion projects scoped out correctly. Working across a world-class infrastructure of vastly distributed systems, our Trading Operations Engineers ensure reliability and performance, and have a direct impact on our ability to trade and trading results.

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:

• Deploy, monitor and optimize a suite of proprietary trading applications
• Provide technical expertise/support to a high frequency trading floor in a competitive market-making environment
• Continually drive production systems toward cleanliness, simplicity and reliability
• Support optimal firm performance and hardware/software connection during rollout of new trading solutions or locations
• Develop fluency with existing systems, infrastructure and procedures and proactively improve them
• Intelligently automate while maintaining firm human control
• Script against configuration files, databases and logs
• Work with engineering teams (DevOps, Software Engineering, Infrastructure) to ensure the health and stability of the production trading environment

Who you are:

As an Optiver Trading Operations Engineer, you’ll have:

• A Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related technical field
• Experience with Python or similar scripting language
• Experience with SQL and data administration
• Experience with operating systems and understanding network architectures
• A decisive nature, engineering mindset and preference for simple clean solutions
• The ability to handle a dynamic trading floor with constant face-to-face interaction with end-users (traders, researchers and fellow engineers)
• Experience working on a broad range of projects that use various tools to best solve the problem at hand
• A client-focused, service-minded approach with a strong sense of urgency
• An ability to stay composed regardless of what is happening
• Interest in how hardware and software connects

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.