What attracted you to apply to Optiver?
At first, it was the friendliness of the Recruitment team, who I met at a career fair. After that, it just got more and more fascinating as I hear about the maths and probability behind the trading problem – potentially unbounded complexity and a fascinating puzzle.
What team do you work in and what are they responsible for?
I’m in the Options Pricing Research team. We are responsible for leveraging historical and live data to iterate upon and improve the options prices that we show the market. In close collaboration with Trading, we develop models and projects to provide tools for traders to apply and integrate into their systematic position-taking.
Describe an interesting project?
Currently, I’m managing a project on positional allocation for one of our teams. When they often trade hundreds of instruments at a time, it can be very tricky to know the optimal position allocation between the instruments beyond gut feel/experience. We feel this is a key area where there is an opportunity for a data-driven approach to have a huge impact, and it is great to be given this opportunity so early in my career.
What keeps you motivated?
There are always problems and projects which need attention – the job is never done for us in Research. Pretty much every one of these problems has some interesting maths behind it and it can be very rewarding to see the concrete impact of your work on the company. The support provided by Talent and my team management is also second to none.
What was your training like?
The training program was very cohesive, comprehensive, and really builds your industry knowledge base from the ground up. Optiver made a great effort to make the program accessible to those not from a finance background. The Head of Education would give us detailed and fascinating explanations of key concepts, and we would immediately get to go and apply them to the simulations, projects, or discuss them with the experienced traders on the floor during the many traders shadowing opportunities. Importantly, the program was just an enjoyable time – plenty of healthy collaboration and friendly competition from within the group creates a positive environment to expedite the learning process.
What do you love most about your role/Optiver?
I love getting to see some of the more niche maths I learned at university have a direct measurable application to a ‘real world problem’. For example, concepts such as stochastic analysis, time series analysis, statistical inference often when taught at university can be hard to see how they apply to the world outside of the abstract. This is just one of the rewarding and fascinating things you get out of working at Optiver.
If I could pick a second thing it would be the people – I am yet to meet someone who isn’t respectful, intelligent, driven and fun to be around. You always look forward to going to work if only to catch up with your team!
Do you have any tips for graduates going through the process?
Perhaps the big tip I can give is never to settle – even once you have made it through the process you need to keep that drive alive, and hit the ground running to get the most out of Optiver.