Trading Operations Engineer

The Trading Operations Production Support Engineering team is the steward of Optiver’s trading systems, balancing a safe, orderly production environment with profitability and sustainable growth.

Our responsibility is to stay ahead of the inherent complexity in rapidly scaling a distributed system that trades many classes of financial instruments across dozens of exchanges and thousands of servers - all the while striving for simplicity, stability, and operational excellence.

Our team understands 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. 

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.

As one of the world’s major financial centres, London was selected as the home of Optiver’s FX trading business, our UK-focused Institutional Trading Team and rapidly growing commodities trading arm. Optiver UK is located in a city that bridges European, Asian and American time zones, connecting our regional offices and embracing a truly global mind-set. London is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and is home to some of the best museums, a thriving international restaurant scene and bustling high streets that attract people from all over the globe.

• Deploy, maintain, and monitor 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 work to improve them.
• Work with development to set standards ensuring the long-term health and stability of the production trading environment, even in extreme conditions.
• Support and coordinate deployments of new trading products, trading systems, exchanges, and datacenters.
• Intelligently automate our system management tooling while maintaining firm human control.

• You are a pragmatic, logical thinker.
• You have a collaborative and positive attitude.
• You can stay composed and even thrive in intense, high-pressure environments.
• You notice when workflows have room to be improved, and strive to find clean and simple ways to make them more efficient.
• You are naturally curious about hardware and software, and how these interact.
• You want to work on a broad range of projects and are highly organized in keeping track of concurrent responsibilities while keeping stakeholders informed.
• You can look at code, figure out how it works, and explore how to make it better.
• You are able to clearly explain your thoughts through written and verbal communication, ask insightful questions, and are not afraid to challenge or defend a strategy. 
• You seek out opportunities to leave your comfort zone and enjoy frequent change.

• A background in managing day-to-day operations of software and hardware infrastructure.
• Strong design, debugging, and problem solving skills.
• Experience with operating systems (especially Unix/Linux) and an understanding of networking fundamentals and protocols.
• Experience with Python or similar scripting language for automating tasks.
• Experience with relational databases (we largely use PostgreSQL but welcome experience with any other database).
• Prior experience working in the trading industry is a plus, but is not a requirement.

At Optiver UK, you will be part of a well-established and high-performing global firm whilst experiencing the excitement that comes from a growing operation. As our London operations grow, the opportunity to make a global impact and take your career to a new level expands with it. We offer a supportive environment for you to perform at your best. Some of our key benefits include:

• Competitive remuneration;
• 27 paid vacation days (plus UK public holidays);
• Daily onsite breakfast and lunch;
• Paid commuting expenses (home to office);
• 50% paid gym subscription;
• Private medical insurance;
• Pension scheme;
• Training, conference attendance and continuous learning opportunities;
• International transfer opportunities.

Apply directly via the form below and please provide us with a CV and letter of motivation in English. Should there be a potential match, a member of our team will reach out sooner rather than later. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to [email protected].

When applying for a role with Optiver UK Limited, the recruitment process is run via our Optiver global recruitment team. The personal data you will submit as part of the recruitment process may be processed in the UK, US and the Netherlands. By continuing with your application you hereby consent to your personal data being processed in these locations. More information on how Optiver processes your personal data can be found in our Privacy Policy.

As an intentionally flat organisation, we believe that great ideas and impact can come from everyone. We are passionate about empowering individuals and creating diverse teams that thrive. Every person at Optiver should feel included, valued and respected, because we believe our best work is done together.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion 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.