Title: Trading Operations Engineer (2024 Start)
Location: Chicago

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

We’re responsible for optimally scaling a distributed system that handles half a million financial instruments across multiple data centers and servers –all 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:

At Optiver, 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. We tackle the toughest problems, challenge the status quo and always aim for excellence. As one of the largest market making institutions, we are a trusted partner of 70+ exchanges across the globe.

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’ll 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 upon 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:

• Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in CS or other STEM field
• Have an expected graduation date between December 2023 and June 2024
• Passionate for problem solving in a start-up environment
• Possesses a strong desire to work with a wide scope of technologies
• Have experience with:
  • Python, Ruby, or Perl
  • SQL and data administration
  • Operating systems and understanding network architectures
• Has knowledge of trading exchanges and financial instruments is not required
• Is attentive to detail and appreciates 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.  

Additionally, you’ll 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.

*We accept one application per role per year. If you have previously applied to this position this season and have been unsuccessful, you can reapply once the next recruitment season begins in 2024.