Chinmay – AMSTERDAM
working at Optiver
Where talent
meets opportunity
CHOOSE YOUR path
Launch your career
Whether you’re a student considering an internship, a graduate looking for a full-time role, or simply curious about life at a leading trading firm, Optiver offers a range of opportunities to navigate your future career in tech, trading, risk and research.
Global opportunities
Our five critical domains
domain
Market-making
Trading
domain
Trading is at the core of what we do
Optiver trades thousands of financial instruments on exchanges worldwide, using our own capital and at our own risk. As a market maker, we aim to improve the markets in which we trade by continuously offering the most competitive prices possible.
To be not only active but also precise, across all of these markets and products is a hugely complex challenge. We continuously refine and optimise our proprietary trading strategies and algorithms to price the thousands of instruments we trade. After all, the only constant in markets is change, and keeping up requires nimble, decisive thinkers — a pretty accurate description of an Optiver trader.
Domain
Cutting-edge
Technology
Domain
Our business is driven by technology
Technology isn’t just a component of Optiver’s business – it powers everything we do.
We leverage technology to solve a variety of complex problems: optimising for scarce bandwidth, responding to market events in nanoseconds, pricing complex sets of financial instruments with low error tolerance and analysing huge volumes of data. Our systems are built to add stability to the market; therefore they must operate at peak efficiency in extreme conditions.
domain
Deep, quantitative
Research
domain
Data scientists improve our trading strategies
How does Optiver continuously price hundreds of thousands of financial products in real-time? One word: Data.
Data Science is at the very core of Optiver’s pricing strategies. Our teams tackle challenges at the intersection of technology and trading – where some of the most complex and valuable financial market data resides. With world-class skills that cut through the noise, Optiver’s data science teams directly contribute to the precision and scalability of our trading business.
domain
Compliance-led
Control and risk management
domain
Risk management is in our DNA
At Optiver, risk management and control are built into our financial and operational processes. Our dedicated team of Risk and Control professionals ensures we’re operating in accordance with local regulations, laws, market requirements and expectations. It’s one reason why we’re trusted to provide continuous prices for thousands of financial instruments on 70+ exchanges around the globe.
We focus on five core risk and control domains at Optiver – market risk, automated trading risk, operational risk management, compliance and control.
domain
People-led
Business operations
domain
People shape the future of our firm
At Optiver, people are our greatest strength. That’s why we’re passionate about empowering them and championing inclusivity in everything that we do. From wide-ranging benefits to countless learning opportunities, we pride ourselves on enriching our people’s well-being and investing in their development.
OUR PEOPLE
Combining IQ and EQ
When solving some of the most complex financial challenges, we seek people with bright minds and humble mindsets.
Joris – Amsterdam
Engineer
Winnie – Sydney
Market Risk Intern
OUR VALUES
We look for…
Collaborative thinkers
While most of our people are competitive at heart, we still believe that our best work is done together. Our unique internal culture fosters an environment that not only accepts working together on projects but encourages it.
Continuous learners
At Optiver, continuous innovation is the name of the game. Whether it’s Trading, Technology, Compliance, Risk or Business Operations, our flexible career paths provide opportunities for our people to continuously improve upon and fine tune their skills.
Challenge seekers
The strategies and technology we deploy to keep the markets stable are deeply complex. Our people thrive on finding ways to do all of these things faster, smarter and more efficiently — every single day.
Entrepreneurial spirits
While we take measures to mitigate risk as a business, we encourage our people to step out of their comfort zones as often as they can. The sharing of ideas can come from any and everyone, and we take pride in our people feeling comfortable to openly do so to explore new opportunities and unlock new potential.
ONBOARDING
Discover our interview process
Our interview process varies by role, but there are a few things they all share in common.
01
Application
Submit your job application and information on our website.
02
Assessments
Our assessments vary based on role, skill level and experience, and may include quantitative, cognitive or technical assessments.
03
Initial interviews
Candidates are invited for a conversation to assess skills, cultural fit and working style.
04
Final interviews and discussions
Candidates typically undergo a series of behavioral and technical interviews to further dive into how they think.
CULTURE
Life at Optiver
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Technology When Speed and Scale Collide
Data systems are often described along two axes: speed and scale. In practice, “speed” usually means some combination of latency and throughput, and systems are often optimized for one at the expense of the other, sometimes by trading efficiency for raw capacity. Those distinctions tend to break down quickly once systems move beyond simple use […]
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Technology Real-Time Trading Dashboards with Databricks Apps and Dash
Learn how Optiver built real-time trading dashboards using Databricks Apps and Dash. Discover the architecture behind low-latency, scalable insights for fast decision-making.
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Experienced, Meet the team, Trading Inside Optiver’s Institutional Trading Team
Ask five Institutional Traders how they got here, and you’ll get five different answers. Traders from Optiver’s Institutional team share their diverse paths, how they use their unique backgrounds every day, and practical advice for anyone considering the role.
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Life at Optiver, Program From FutureFocus to Optiver’s quant trading internship
FutureFocus is an educational program that gives students an inside look at the challenges our technology, trading, and research teams face everyday.
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Technology Research at Scale: Orchestrating ML for Systematic Trading
Adapted from a technical talk by Rob Hahn, this article explains how systematic trading relies on fast, reproducible research cycles and the engineering decisions that make those cycles work at scale.
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Experienced, Technology Choosing between free threading and async in Python
As host of this year’s first PyAmsterdam Meetup, Optiver welcomed the local Python community back to our headquarters for an evening of tech talks, networking and knowledge sharing. To open the event, Optiver Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead Samet Yaslan delivered a timely talk for developers working on performance-critical systems: “Choosing Between Free Threading and Async.” Prompting his choice of topic was a recent change in CPython, as Samet explained: “Beginning with version 3.13, CPython introduces an option for a build known as free threading, where the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) is removed. The question is: With the GIL gone, do we still need async in Python?” Here’s how he breaks it down, and what it means for your next Python project.
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Meet the team Career Kickstarter Tech: The ‘why’ behind every trading system
At Optiver, our engineers work on some of the most advanced systems in the world, solving unique challenges that combine performance, efficiency and real-time decision-making. Our Career Kickstarter: Women in Tech program invites aspiring female-identifying engineers from across Europe to explore how their coding and problem-solving skills apply to real-world challenges in financial markets. We […]
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Recruitment at Optiver Optiver EU campus recruiting Q&A
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Life at Optiver, Technology Interning on Optiver’s Austin HFT Team
Former software engineer intern Ethan shares what it was like to build production systems on Optiver’s Austin high-frequency trading team.
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Experienced, Technology Why DevEx matters to Optiver
Optiver’s Global Head of Developer Experience, Cian Lane, shares how DevEx boosts productivity firm-wide: 30% faster CI builds and onboarding cut to minutes.
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