Our internship program includes impactful, hands-on project work that’s designed to solve real challenges our teams are tackling.

Software engineering internship: Interns work closely with the engineering team to develop tools that have real impact. One past project made it easier for traders to instantly pull data on specific products–streamlining workflows as the team scaled from trading 10 to 100+ products.

Quant trading internship: Trading interns are provided with a sandbox of proprietary data to test strategies, build models and explore hypotheses. Past projects have included designing and comparing delta hedging strategies to reduce PnL variance, using Python to take positions around recurring market events, such as earnings announcements, and applying machine learning to predict future realized volatility of stocks and indices.

Quant research internship: Throughout the summer, quant research interns are paired with a mentor to work on high-impact projects driven by problems the business is trying to solve. These are real-world problems–not case studies. For example, using historical data and machine learning techniques to develop models that predict the moves of futures contracts.

Hardware engineering internship: FPGA interns design and deploy optimizations to low-latency hardware execution strategies and investigate their success rates. A past project focused on ensuring the health of FPGAs by creating a monitoring system. This system tracks and notifies the status of the FPGA boards, allowing for continuous monitoring of critical metrics such as temperature and power.

Prior to your start date, you’ll join an info session with our tech leads to learn more about our team structure, projects and tech stack. From there, we’ll place you with a team based on your interest, skillset and business needs.

Our tech teams work together to solve for a variety of problems. Depending on which team you’re placed with, your work could include:

• Developing low-latency systems that trade options on the majority of the most liquid asset classes in the market.
• Collaborating closely with traders and quant researchers to build and improve our machine learning-based trading system.
• Translating Optiver’s trading strategies into interactions with various exchanges, where the majority of our trading occurs.

While both exist on the trading spectrum, and require strong analytical skills and mathematical thinking, the day-to-day work can look quite different.

Quant research leans more heavily on AI, machine learning and full automation–much like programming a chess engine to play on its own. On the other hand, quant trading relies on a dynamic blend of technology and human decision-making–more like piloting an airplane, where real-time judgement still plays a crucial role.

Read more about these roles here.

The interns who thrive here are naturally curious, take initiative and are eager to learn. They embrace feedback and use it to grow.

We keep things fun with events like Friday social hours, professional sports games and local activities so you can explore the city. Plus, you’ll be invited to all Optiver-hosted events with full-time employees!

Our application process is designed to be engaging and thorough. As one of the first steps, you’ll connect directly with a recruiter so we can get to know you beyond your resume. The process can vary by role but includes a technical assessment and interviews with team members, including senior leaders. You’ll have the opportunity to showcase your skills while we learn how you think and approach problems.