Graduate FPGA Engineer (2025 Start - Chicago)

As an FPGA Engineer, you will help deploy trading strategies across the world’s largest financial markets. You will create solutions with nanosecond response times, highly parallelized algorithms and customized low-level networking that solve business challenges effectively and efficiently. Working closely with our business, we have in-depth insight into a problem before developing the solution.

In the first eight weeks, you will participate in Optiver’s comprehensive Global Academy and be equipped with the knowledge needed to make an impact the moment you join your team. The comprehensive training covers trading theory and Optiver’s tech stack to hone your skills for your role. In addition, you will be paired with a dedicated mentor who will empower you to take ownership of your work and make a difference.

As a Graduate FPGA Engineer, you’ll work on a team of FPGA and Software Engineers to design and maintain our proprietary systems with the goal of finding the simplest solutions to the most complex problems. In this role, you will:

• Accelerate network infrastructure and trading system components with high-speed hardware designs.
• Research new low-latency techniques and platforms and identify opportunities for integration with our trading system.

• Work in a multidisciplinary team of traders, software developers and infrastructure engineers.
• Leverage the best hardware available or build in-house versions to ensure our FPGAs can interface with cutting-edge server hardware.

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 the toughest problems in the financial markets.

In addition, you’ll receive:

• A highly competitive compensation package.
• Global profit-sharing pool and performance-based bonus structure.
• 401(k) match up to 50% and fully paid health insurance.
• 25 paid vacation days alongside market holidays.
• Extensive office perks, including breakfast, lunch and snacks, regular social events, clubs, sporting leagues and more.

• A student working toward an undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Engineering,  Electrical Engineering or a related field and graduating 
• Someone with strong engineering instincts and academic experience in digital design with FPGAs or ASICs
• Experienced in writing hardware in VHDL, Verilog or SystemsVerilog
• Passionate for clean code, simple, well-architected systems and continuous improvement, with a desire to know how the systems you build fit into our trading activities
• Able to work closely with developers, traders and business operations

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion.

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