As we continue to grow and expand into new markets faster than ever, this is an opportunity for you to help enable one of our most exciting business areas to realise its full potential. Reporting directly to the Head of Trading Infrastructure, your role will be to focus on the D1 trading business, based in Austin, bringing your breadth of trading infrastructure and business knowledge coupled with deep expertise in Networks to establish the longer term vision for Austin. You will be work directly with the trading team to achieve this, forming partnerships with technology colleagues in infrastructure and development. Initially, this role will be a hands-on individual contributor role, working closely with and leveraging the skills of the wider team in Chicago to support execution, but over time building a local team, hiring engineers who support the D1 business strategy.

This role is for someone looking for end to end involvement and the ability to think through this challenge from start to finish. From data center and capacity planning, determining if that will be dictated by exchange cable lengths, microwave providers, physical locations to want a presence at and why, where we should think of buying space and the real-world network complications of all of that. You will act as an equal counterpart to our development and trading teams who will be pushing and thinking of how we can scale up our systems and trade more products, through close collaboration providing the perspective and ability to consider all the major implications on the physical infrastructure for us to be able to achieve those results.

Who we are

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 stabilising 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.

Based in ‘The Domain’ neighborhood, Optiver’s Austin office serves as the firm’s innovation nucleus, with a strong focus on quantitative research, software and hardware engineering initiatives. With tech innovation an integral part of our core business, the booming city proved an ideal backdrop for our heavy investment into machine learning, research infrastructure and big data computing. What’s more, with world-class music, food and art scenes, as well as countless scenic outdoor activities, the quality of life for Austin Optiverians is second to none.

What You’ll Do

• Act as the Trading Infrastructure counterpart to D1 in Austin.
• Develop a deep understanding of needs and path to scale D1 compute.
• Work closely with developers and traders and help form a bridge between teams.
• Help to develop D1 network architecture, colocations, data center planning and vendor management.

Who You Are

You need to be someone who understands the end to end physical infrastructure including data centers and microwave providers and be in a position to understand and advise the business on the implications of any new project for D1.

Ideally you will have HFT experience specifically and trading experience more generally, not necessarily in D1 as you can learn this easily with foundational knowledge. We’re looking for someone with both breadth and depth of knowledge, ideally with deep knowledge in Network Architecture and you would enjoy experimenting in the Austin lab to stitch together a proof of concept and help weigh out different trade-offs, that would be very valuable!

Essential Skills and Experience

• Experience architecting networking to scale within a trading environment.
• Experience with managing senior stakeholders and relationships with engineering peers.
• Broad technical knowledge of overall infrastructure architecture combined with some area of deep expertise.
• An ability to simplify complex problems and find consistency.
• Pragmatic approach to pinpoint where D1 actually needs to deviate from the rest of our shared infrastructure and be cognizant of the impact changes have to the business.
• Strong communicator able to help to improve the communication between Austin and Chicago, capable of becoming a partner to stakeholders and can help develop those relationships.
• A capable leader able to facilitate a shift in perspective to find the commonalities with existing infrastructure, which elements can be shared and who will be able to challenge suggested solutions from other areas of the business to the physical infrastructure changes required.

Beneficial

• Experience adding and expanding data centres to an existing network, including location selection, vendor negotiation and technical design.
• Experience working with and adding connectivity to new exchanges.

• Work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 40 different countries.
• Performance based bonus structure that is unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine 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 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.