The Application Engineering team is the steward of our trading systems, balancing a safe, orderly production environment with profitability and sustainable growth.

Our responsibility is to stay ahead of the inherent complexity in scaling a distributed system that handles over half a million correlated financial instruments across multiple data centers and thousands of servers – all the while striving for simplicity, dependability, and operational excellence. 

We understand the full breadth of all production systems, including how they interconnect and interact and use this knowledge to deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, and scale up our trading infrastructure. We work with traders, development teams and operations teams to coordinate and influence improvements to our systems. 

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.

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:

In this position, you will be covering our Night Trading shift of 4pm-1am and have the following responsibilities:

• Deploy, monitor, and configure a suite of proprietary trading applications
• Provide technical expertise and support to a high frequency trading floor in a competitive market-making environment
• 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
• Act as a single point of contact for general IT questions or assistance
• Solve IT issues for trading and enterprise applications
• Work with development to ensure the health and stability of the production trading environment
• Continually drive production systems toward cleanliness, simplicity, and reliability
• Track and solve issues as part of a fast-paced results driven set of IT teams

Who You Are:

• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related technical field
• Passion for problem solving in a start-up environment
• Strong desire to work with a wide scope of technologies
• Experience with Python, Ruby, or Perl
• Experience with SQL and data administration
• Experience with operating systems and understanding network architectures
• Knowledge of trading exchanges and financial instruments is not required
• Attention to detail and cleanliness

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.