WHO WE ARE
Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established in 1986, today we are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world, united in our commitment to improve the market through competitive pricing, execution and risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world in various financial instruments we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets. We provide liquidity to financial markets using our own capital, at our own risk, trading a wide range of products: listed derivatives, cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign currencies.
We’re looking for a hands-on Data Engineer to accelerate the way our traders and researchers generate alpha in commodity derivatives, including iron ore, electricity, petroleum and other commodities products. In this role, you’ll design and build flexible, high-performance data onboarding and research workflows that enable new datasets to be evaluated in days.
You’ll be embedded closely with trading and research teams, building tools and infrastructure that streamline the entire data journey, from ingestion to live signal evaluation and model updates. You will work with our best engineers, traders, and researchers. Your ideas will be shipped to production quickly, and will impact trading outcomes the next day.
At Optiver, AI is in our DNA. Every day you will both use AI to accelerate your productivity writing code and as part of your solutions impacting trading.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build and maintain robust ingestion pipelines for a wide range of external datasets (e.g. news, freight, weather, demand forecasts, surveys, regulatory).
- Develop lightweight, scalable schemas and storage patterns to support rapid data exploration.
- Work closely with traders and researchers to identify pain points and design tools that remove workflow friction.
- Create sandboxed pipelines for fast experimentation with new datasets, with a clear path to production if they prove valuable.
- Champion best practices in data lineage, reproducibility, and accessibility.
WHO YOU ARE
We are looking for a highly skilled Data Engineer with:
- Minimum 4 years of experience as a data engineer or in a similar role, ideally in a trading, hedge fund, or alternative data environment.
- Strong programming skills in Python and SQL, and deep familiarity with modern data tooling (e.g. Airflow, Spark, Databricks, etc.).
- Prior experience working with commodities-related datasets, such as news, weather, demand forecasts, freight, satellite and remote sensing data, geolocation data, web scraping, market adjacent metrics or unconventional and underutilized data sources relevant to the commodities space
- Experience leveraging AI programming tools and agentic engineering
- A proven track record of building fast, flexible pipelines that empower researchers or trading teams to iterate quickly.
- A pragmatic mindset with the ability to balance speed and long-term scalability.
- Strong communication skills and genuine curiosity about markets and how data drives trading outcomes.
WHAT YOU'LL GET
You’ll join a culture of collaboration and excellence, where you’ll be surrounded by curious thinkers and creative problem solvers. Driven by a passion for continuous improvement, you’ll thrive in a supportive, high-performing environment alongside talented colleagues, working collectively to tackle some of the most complex problems in the financial markets.
In return for your expertise, you will be offered a competitive salary package as well as access to a range of Optiver perks, including:
The chance to work alongside best-in-class professionals
Competitive remuneration, including an attractive bonus structure and additional leave entitlements
Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities
Gym membership plus weekly in-house chair massages
Daily breakfast, lunch and snacks
Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion, and it is hardwired through every stage of our hiring process. We encourage applications from candidates from any and all backgrounds, and we welcome requests for reasonable adjustments during the process to ensure that you can best demonstrate your abilities.
Top Skills
What We Do
Optiver’s story began over 30 years ago, when we started business as a single trader on the floor of Amsterdam’s options exchange. Today, we are at the forefront of trading and technology as a leading global electronic market maker, focused on pricing, execution and risk management.
Why Work With Us
People at Optiver love challenges, welcome collaboration, and strive to be better tomorrow than they are today. Improving the market is an extraordinary challenge that requires a carefully crafted approach. Optiver provides a collaborative working environment to tackle these challenges. In fact, it is this way of working that sets us apart.
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