Principal Observability Platform Engineer

WHO WE ARE

Optiver is a tech-driven trading firm and leading global market maker. For over 35 years, Optiver has been improving financial markets worldwide, making them more transparent and efficient for all participants. With more than 1,400 employees in offices around the world, we’re united in our commitment to improving the market through competitive pricing, execution and thorough risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world, we actively trade on 70+ exchanges, where we’re trusted to always provide accurate buy and sell pricing – no matter the market conditions.

WHAT YOU'LL DO
We are looking for a Principal Observability Platform Engineer to help evolve observability as a business-critical platform capability at Optiver. You will work on the shared platform behind metrics, logs, traces, events, alerts, dashboards, diagnostics, instrumentation and service health.

This is a platform engineering role for someone who enjoys building reliable systems used by other engineers. You will help turn a capable but heterogeneous observability foundation into a globally consistent, regionally federated platform that is reliable at scale, easy to adopt, and deeply embedded in how Optiver builds and operates production systems.

As a Senior Observability Platform Engineer, you will design, build, and operate components that help engineers, operators, trading teams, automated systems, and future agent-based workflows collect, query, understand, and act on production signals. You will work across platform and production domains: building high-scale telemetry pipelines, improving instrumentation quality, creating golden paths for adoption, and making observability more useful during real production investigations.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and operate components of Optiver’s shared observability platform across telemetry collection, ingestion, storage, query, visualisation, alerting, diagnostics, and service health.

• Build software, services, APIs, integrations, libraries, dashboards, automation, and reusable patterns that make observability easier to adopt and more reliable to operate.

• Improve the scalability, reliability, performance, cost-effectiveness, and operational quality of high-volume telemetry systems.

• Improve developer and operator experience through self-service workflows, golden paths, documentation, investigation tooling, and practical platform abstractions.

• Work with engineering, infrastructure, trading systems, research, and regional operations teams to understand production debugging needs and improve observability adoption.

• Own the reliability and operational quality of the components you build, including service health, failure modes, monitoring, incident learnings, and continuous improvement.

• Raise the standard for telemetry quality, instrumentation, alerting, dashboards, diagnostic workflows, and service health across Optiver.
  

WHAT YOU'LL BRING
You are a strong engineer with experience in production systems, platform engineering, SRE, infrastructure, observability, or distributed systems. You are comfortable working on systems that need to be reliable, scalable, understandable, and useful to other engineers.

You understand that observability is not just a tooling problem. It is about signal quality, platform reliability, developer experience, production workflows, and adoption. You care about building systems that engineers trust, operators can rely on, and production teams can depend on during high-pressure situations.

You will bring:

• Strong engineering experience in SRE, software engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, observability, developer tooling, or distributed systems.

• A production mindset, with the ability to reason about failure modes, debugging workflows, service reliability, operational impact, and how systems behave under pressure.

• Technical understanding of modern observability practices across logs, metrics, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, telemetry pipelines, diagnostics, instrumentation quality, and service health.

• Experience designing, building, or operating reliable services, platforms, pipelines, tools, or automation used by other engineering teams.

• Good judgement in technical trade-offs across performance, scalability, reliability, complexity, cost, and maintainability.

• A delivery mindset, with the ability to take ambiguous platform problems and turn them into practical, reliable solutions.

• Strong preference will be given to candidates with experience on observability, SRE, infrastructure, platform, production engineering, or developer tooling teams in large-scale distributed systems environments, including telemetry pipelines, streaming systems, time-series data, log platforms, query systems, alerting systems, or production diagnostics tooling.

• Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, ClickHouse, VictoriaMetrics, InfluxDB, Telegraf, Vector, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus-style systems, or custom telemetry collectors is valued.

WHAT YOU’LL GET

• A performance-based bonus structure unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool, fostering a truly collaborative environment.

• The chance to work alongside diverse and intelligent peers in a rewarding environment.

• Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities.

• Daily breakfast, lunch and an in-house barista.

• Gym membership plus weekly in-house chair massages.

• Regular social events, including a company trip every two years.

• Guided relocation, a competitive relocation package and visa sponsorship where necessary.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments during the process.

Questions? Get in touch with the recruitment team at [email protected].