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.

ENGINEERING AT OPTIVER

We pioneer our own trading strategies and systems using sophisticated technology, running a global network with thousands of high-performance, low-latency applications that solve problems in nanoseconds. We take full control of each small detail of our infrastructure by building and managing each aspect of our compute systems. We manage more than 2000 servers in multiple locations around across the US. All of them are connected by a private wide area network back to our main datacenter.

We know that Infrastructure as Code is the best way to enable us to scale and keep standards as fresh as possible. We want to solve the challenges of infrastructure operations with software so we are looking for Software Engineers, but we are also looking for people with a good understanding of networking or the Linux Kernel internals. Our teams are an intersection of these profiles. 

WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE

Required:

• A Software Engineer with at least 5 years experience
• Experience with real life infrastructure.
• You can code in Python or have the propensity to pick it up.
• A strong desire to automate your work with a reluctance to do repetitive tasks but an eagerness to solve problems.
• You think that not all the tools are good for every problem and you can adapt to what the current problem needs.
• The ability to manage your time and handle priorities in collaboration with other teams.
• A proactive approach to problem solving.

Extra points:

• Experience building Python tools for infrastructure automation.
• High attention to detail coupled with strong communication skills.
• Experience with configuration management (we use Ansible but experience with similar tools is considered); We are in very interested on Declarative systems.
• Knowledge of virtualization technologies, networking, bare metal server management.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

There are different teams in the Infrastructure Department working to create a robust and reliable foundation for Optiver's infrastructure platform. As an Infrastructure Software Engineer you can join our Linux or Infra-Platform teams. In both cases you will work close to other experts depending on each project.

As our next team member, you can expect to: 

• Participate in the design and implementation of the systems used to manage our infrastructure. Writing mostly Python code.
• We encourage OSS adoption and we contribute to upstream repos.
• This will include modelling, provisioning, configuration management, Observability, deployment.
• Split your time between operational tasks and development (80:20). Note: Some members of the team do a bit more operational work, while others are more development-focused. This depends on individual skillsets and preferences.
• You will join a rotation schedule for our “Operational week”  where you keep an eye on our dashboards in case of incidents while helping other users in our chat or at your desks. On those days you will also work on small tasks.
• You will join our on-call rotation (this is only including some hours during the day. Not 24/7).

Some examples of day to day tasks: 

• • Write and review code with your team.
  • Provision servers or network devices through our automated deployment pipeline.
  • Apply configuration changes to our infrastructure.
  • Debug production issues.
  • Support Developers and Operations teams.
  • Plan and coordinate changes in our infrastructure together with other teams in the department.

Some of the things we are doing right now:

• • Designing a command line client and HTTP API (we use FastAPI) to provision Linux bare metal servers and networking devices.
  • Maintaining the critical component capable of killing all connections to the exchange in case of unexpected issues in our systems – a crucially important Risk Control given the nature of highly automated, low latency trading.
  • Supporting and extending a system that describes our infrastructure (this is the source for all the Infrastructure as Code that we do).
  • Improving our image-based server deployment system to achieve minimal provisioning time.
  • Automating our network devices provisioning and configuration management using open source software.
  • Redesigning our Linux Authentication stack.

Some example projects that you could help us with:

• • Build our next generation Observability stack. Help us to take it to the next level designing bare metal capable monitoring systems that work at large scale.
  • Develop our “terraform like” tool to manage our infra in a declarative way, enabling faster growth in a complex bespoke environment.
  • Automate operations to empower other teams to perform critical tasks without our direct evolvement.