Senior Trading Infrastructure Engineer - Python

As Optiver continues to find news ways of improving what we do in the context of strong business growth, we have identified an opportunity for a completely new role at Optiver within our Trading Infrastructure team: this is an opportunity to put your full range of engineering skills to use and help us elevate the way we manage the common systems upon which our trading, infrastructure and development teams rely upon. One of our biggest challenges, and area of greatest opportunity, is how we approach building bespoke platforms and Infrastructure-as-Code in a non-cloud environment.

 

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.

 

Optiver Chicago’s culture parallels the energetic city we’re immersed in. Home to the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Board Options Exchange, and Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago has established itself as the trading capital of the US. Active on leading US exchanges, Optiver’s Chicago office trades a wide range of products from listed derivatives to cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign exchange.

 

In this senior role, you will be working on the design and implementation of the systems used to manage our infrastructure. This could involve work to enhance or build new systems to improve modelling, provisioning, configuration management and deployment. It could also involve improving our observability capabilities and alerting, garnering insight and visibility into our systems and properly owning the common systems upon which infrastructure relies.

 

You are a highly experienced Engineer with a combination of skills from writing production level code in Python, architecture and design as well as networks and Linux systems. You are comfortable with being in an empowered position whereby you are often called upon to make decisions, applying a common-sense, pragmatic approach resulting in dealing with the problems that really matter.

 

You will have hands-on experience building platforms, frameworks, tools and systems to solve business problems, working directly with stakeholders to define problems, plans, and ultimately execution. Ideally you will have experience of doing this within an on-prem and/or bare metal environment. You spend more of your time building tools than using them and approach infrastructure problems through the lens of a Software Engineer. You likely started your career in Software Engineering and have reorientated your focus towards infrastructure/IaC. 

 

You will be able to demonstrate your leadership qualities in the way you work, communicate and take independent action when required. You will be very used to working with other teams, including global colleagues and be an effective communicator with these groups. You will also have the ability to build and grow a high performing team.

 

You will have some area of technical strength you can point to with confidence but also an ability to simplify complex problems and find consistency. You've probably accumulated a great deal of experience in some or all of: low level Linux; networking; hardware (FPGA, ASIC, PCB); CI/CD; Observability, but not afraid to take on any challenge that helps our business perform better.

 

• Work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 40 different countries.
• Performance based bonus structure that is unmatched anywhere in the industry with our approach of combining our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool fostering a truly collaborative environment to work in.
• Ownership over initiatives that directly solve business problems.
• Alongside this you will get great other benefits such as 25 paid vacation days and market holidays, fully paid commuting expenses and health insurance, daily breakfast and lunch, training opportunities, 401(k) match up to 50% and charitable match opportunities, regular social events and clubs, and many more.