Jobs › Optiver

Senior Production Software Engineer

Optiver · Chicago, IL · Infrastructure

Posted Oct 2, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

About your past

Tell me about a time you automated away a painful manual operations task.

What they are checking: Whether they reduce operational friction with real tooling and measure the result.

Tell me about how you have mentored a junior engineer.

What they are checking: Whether they invest in others' growth, which the posting expects of a senior engineer.

What would you do

How would you safely deploy a change to a trading system while markets are open?

What they are checking: Whether they understand canary releases, rollback and risk controls in a high-stakes production environment.

A production incident happens and you are the owner of that sub-system. Walk me through what you do.

What they are checking: Whether they take calm operational ownership, from first response to a blameless review and lasting fix.

How do you build feedback loops between operations and developers?

What they are checking: Whether they help teams learn from production, which the posting lists as a key goal.

How do you balance making change faster with keeping trading systems safe?

What they are checking: Whether they see speed and safety as goals that good tooling can support together.

About the work

Tell me about a deployment pipeline you designed. How did it handle validation, rollout and verification?

What they are checking: Whether they have built pipelines that make changes safer, not just faster.

What makes monitoring good for detecting incidents early?

What they are checking: Whether they design alerts and visibility around real impact so operators notice problems quickly.

How do you keep production environments consistent across offices around the world?

What they are checking: Whether they use configuration management and standards to prevent drift between regions.

What languages and tools do you use for production automation, and why?

What they are checking: Whether they pick tools thoughtfully for reliability and maintainability, not just familiarity.

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The full job description

As published by Optiver.

Optiver is looking for an experienced Production Software Engineer with responsibilities for building our infrastructure and automating our trading production environment. This team occupies a wide intersection of stakeholders across the business from operations to development, specifically focusing on scaling up change, increasing robustness, and reducing overhead. Your contributions have the potential to directly enable a faster and safer innovation cycle for Optiver. What you’ll do • Design and build deployment pipelines that improve how changes enter production, from validation through to rollout and verification, considering efficiency, risk management and safety of the process • Build and maintain production environment monitoring infrastructure, focusing on incident detection, operations visibility, and alerting • Develop tooling and automation to reduce operational friction, improve environment consistency, and increase reliability • Collaborate with stakeholders across operations, development, and infrastructure to establish and refine feedback loops across all aspects of production management • Collaborate with engineers in our global offices to align our production environments • Mentor junior team members and help foster the growth of the next generation of engineers • Take operational ownership of production sub-systems • Own your work end-to-end: from understanding the business problem through design, implementation, testing, deployment, and monitoring What you'll get You’ll join a culture of collaboration and excellence, 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, collectively tackling some of the toughest challenges in the financial markets. In addition, you’ll receive: • The opportunity to work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 40 different countries • Highly competitive compensation package • Global profit-sharing pool and performance-based bonus structure • 401(k) match up to 50% • Comprehensive health, mental, dental, vision, disability, and life coverage • 25 paid vacation days alongside market holidays • Extensive office perks, including breakfast, lunch and snacks, regular social events, clubs, sporting leagues and more Who you are You’re a systems-minded engineer who thrives at the intersection of software, infrastructure, and operations. You’re passionate about enabling fast, safe change — and understand the value of clear standards, scalable workflows, and high-trust automation in a production context. • Bachelor’s degree in CS or related technical field • Strong programming ability (Python at a minimum; Golang/Rust would be beneficial) and software engineering principles. • Broad understanding of the full technology stack including server hardware, networking, Linux, databases, web servers and applications • Experience with CI/CD tooling to assist with production change pipelines • Experience with metrics and observability platforms • Experience with technologies such as Ansible, Django, FastAPI, Flask, Jenkins, Hashicorp Vault, Docker/Podman and Kubernetes would be beneficial • Previous experience in production management would be beneficial • Ability to bring an improvement mindset and critical eye to complex operational challenges (including security) and systems   Who we are At Optiver, our mission is to improve the market by injecting liquidity, providing accurate pricing, increasing transparency and stabilizing the market no matter the conditions. With a focus on continuous improvement, we prioritize safeguarding the health and efficiency of the markets for all participants. As one of the largest market making institutions, we are a respected partner on 100+ exchanges across the globe. Our differences are our edge. Optiver does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, or other legally protected characteristics.   Below is the expected base salary for this position. This is a good-faith estimate of the base pay scale for this position and offers will ultimately be determined based on experience, education, skill set, and performance in the interview process. This position will also be eligible for a discretionary bonus (if determined by Optiver) and Optiver’s benefits package with the benefits listed above.    Base Salary Range $200,000 — $200,000 USD

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