What first attracted you to Optiver?
Optiver has a great reputation within the CSE community at my university and has a big campus presence as well. So when I found out they were hiring graduates for an operations role, I applied straight away!
What does your role entail?
My team is responsible for building the tooling and systems that enable our trading environment to run smoothly. This involves handling scheduling & orchestration, service discovery, configuration management, CI/CD, and the developer experience. We also take some time each week to do an incident response shift – this gives us a good feel for the pain points in the environment.
What key skills are required?
Apart from the technical skills (knowledge of a programming language, a familiarity with Linux and networking concepts etc.), I would say the biggest skills needed are creativity and an ability to work autonomously. The problems we solve on a day-to-day basis require you to come up with, test and iterate on solutions quickly. And as with almost any role – communication. Optiver has a flat structure and you’ll often be the one driving your own projects from start to finish – which means keeping stakeholders up to date on progress and working with others when the project branches outside your area of expertise. Communication is especially important for an incident response as you need to ensure everyone is aware of the impact of an incident, and that the right people have received the information required to resolve it.
What are some of the projects you are working on (non-confidential)?
My team and I have recently rolled out a new control system for managing applications in our environment that includes both a web interface as well as a command-line one. There has been a lot of positive feedback from users, and we are actively working on adding features and improving the user experience. I’ve also been working on streamlining our build and deployment process such that developers can spend less time waiting for their changes to be released into production.
How do you start your day at Optiver?
When I’m in the office I’ll usually start by making myself a cup of tea, and catching up on emails and messages before I jump into my daily stand-up meeting.
What do you love about your work?
I love the variety of the work I can pursue, as it keeps me from stagnating in my learning or getting bored – I’ve done everything from front end development to configuration management to writing C++ and architecting deployment solutions.
I’m also a huge fan of the self-driven nature of projects at Optiver. I get to prioritise what I think is most impactful. We also have a great system of writing up project proposals for the team’s consideration, which encourages everyone to contribute to the direction of the team.
What keeps you motivated?
I personally really enjoy releasing features to developers and traders, allowing them to use the environment in a better, more efficient way. They are always very grateful and give thorough and useful feedback.
Do you have interests outside of work that help you in your role?
I have some technical personal projects on the side that I will pick up now and then, but I think my hobbies of martial arts and bouldering are probably more useful in this regard! It can be easy to lose balance in your life when you work a desk job, so I like to make sure I’m keeping my body healthy as well as my mind.
What’s your advice to potential applicants?
Make sure you’re confident and motivated. Everyone I know at Optiver is always open to learning something new, can comfortably admit when they’re out of their depth and is excited to try new things and challenge themselves. I think this kind of attitude is what leads to success in the technical space because you don’t shy away from learning experiences!