Linux Systems Engineer

Location: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Department: Infrastructure

Our Linux engineering team ensures that our critical trading servers and infrastructure operate efficiently and reliably across the globe. In a highly customized, bare-metal environment powered by proprietary tools and technology, you’ll help design and implement cutting-edge solutions that enable scalable technological evolution while maintaining peak performance together with speed and precision.

What you'll do

• Designing, deploying, and managing the lifecycle of a large-scale fleet of Linux servers across multiple data centers, ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Architecting, building, and maintaining systems that drive efficiency and support Optiver’s evolving technology stack.
• Ensuring system reliability by swiftly resolving incidents and optimizing performance to meet trading demands, even during extreme market conditions.
• Researching and implementing new technologies or building enhanced in-house solutions to improve performance and system stability.
• Bridging the gap between hardware and software to ensure seamless interaction and integration.
• Optimizing system and kernel performance, including CPU affinity, NUMA balancing, HugePages, IRQ tuning, and other low-level configurations.
• Developing and maintaining automation tools using Python to enhance system efficiency.
• Monitoring system health and performance using observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager.
• Managing system provisioning and infrastructure deployment using Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Ansible and/or Terraform.
• Joining our rotating support and on-call roster to facilitate global trading operations.

Who you are

• Experience in Linux engineering, debugging, administration, and OS system provisioning

• A solid understanding of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TCP/UDP/multicast, and packet analysis.

• Hands-on experience with system/network tools such as EBPF, tcpdump, strace, ntp/ptp, lsof, nc.

• Experience with performance tuning at both the kernel and hardware level, including CPU pinning, cache optimizations, and BIOS/UEFI tuning.

• Experience with Linux security hardening techniques.

• Experience managing SAN storages.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, version control systems (Git), and PR-based workflows.

• Strong experience with monitoring and alerting tools like Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, and Alert Manager.

• Proficiency in Python for automating operational tasks and system administration.

• Ability to manage large projects, work collaboratively in a team, and communicate effectively to drive technical improvements.

• Willingness to learn new technologies, navigate frequent change, and contribute to a high-performance engineering environment.

No prior trading or financial experience is needed – our onboarding program will kick-start your career at Optiver and support you in gaining all the relevant knowledge about our business.

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. As one of the largest market making institutions, we are a trusted partner of 70+ exchanges across the globe.

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. Motivated 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 performance-based bonus structure, enabling all of our employees to benefit from our global profit pool.
• The opportunity to work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 50 different countries.
• 25 paid vacation days in your first year, increasing to 30 from your second year onwards.
• Training opportunities, discounts on health insurance, and fully paid first-class commuting expenses.
• Extensive office perks, including breakfast, lunch and dinner, world-class barista coffee, in-house physio and chair massages, organized sports and leisure activities, and Friday afternoon drinks.
• Training and continuous learning opportunities, including access to conferences and tech events.
  
  

How to apply
Apply directly via the form below. If you have any questions feel free to contact our Recruitment team via our recruitment inquiry form.

Please note:

• We do not require any assistance from third-parties including agencies in the recruitment of this role
• We cannot accept applications via email
  
  

Diversity statement
Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion.