The short answer: Optiver has no US Quantitative Developer title. The quant developer work sits under Software Engineer titles: the HFT C++ team, Trading Strategies in Chicago, Equities/ETFs and the Research Platform. Even its one Quantitative Developer posting, in Amsterdam, moves shortlisted applicants forward as Core Software Engineers. Optiver lists an online assessment, a behavioural interview with a recruiter and technical interviews on coding and systems design, and says it does not ask standard puzzle or brainteaser questions. Experienced hires also meet engineers and leaders to pick a team. Candidate reports and guides add the details, and they disagree on the assessment's length. Last reviewed October 2026.
Optiver Quantitative Developer at a Glance
Levels
Intern and graduate - Senior Software Engineer
Optiver quantitative developer interview: quick answers
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| How many interview rounds? | Optiver lists an online assessment, a behavioural interview and technical interviews, plus meetings with engineers and leaders for experienced hires. It gives no round count. A 2022 US report describes a 1-hour technical phone screen and a virtual onsite of two 1-hour interviews; a 2021 report describes a virtual onsite of about four hours. |
| What do the rounds test? | Coding, systems design and engineering problem solving, according to Optiver. Its tips name one object-oriented language in depth, data structures and their costs, computer architecture, networking, concurrency and memory management. |
| Can I use AI tools? | Optiver does not publish a rule on AI use in interviews; ask your recruiter. Some programs, such as Career Kickstarter: Tech, teach AI-assisted development, which is a separate question. |
| How much does an Optiver software engineer make? | US developer postings show a single base figure of $200,000, not a range, in New York and Chicago, plus a global profit-sharing pool and a performance bonus. |
| Can I retake the online assessment? | Not for 8 months. Optiver says assessments can be taken once every 8 months, with no resets or retakes once an attempt has started, and it reuses recent results for similar roles. |
| Does Optiver use the Quantitative Developer title? | Only for one posting in Amsterdam, which is assessed as Core Software Engineer. US developer roles are posted as Software Engineer. |
The Optiver quantitative developer role
What Optiver quantitative developers work on, the skills its job postings ask for, and what a week can look like. Optiver posts the role as Software Engineer in the US (HFT C++, Trading Strategies, Equities/ETFs and Research Platform); its only Quantitative Developer posting, in Amsterdam, is assessed as Core Software Engineer.
Primary Focus
What You Need
- C++ in low-latency systems such as market data, order routing or simulation (HFT team)
- Systems-level programming in C or C++ (Trading Strategies)
- Linux and networking fundamentals
- Experience leading large projects (Trading Strategies)
- C++, Python or Java with computer architecture knowledge (campus)
- One object-oriented language and its standard library in depth
- Data structures and their time and space costs
Nice to Have
- C, Python and Linux (HFT team)
- GPUs and CUDA (Research Platform)
- Trading background, which Optiver says is optional
- Concurrency and memory management
Languages
Tools & Technologies
Want to ace the interview?
Practice with real questions.
A Week in the Life of a Optiver Quantitative Developer
Illustrative week · Optiver
An illustrative week for a quantitative developer, built from what Optiver says about the role in its own job postings and publications. Real weeks vary by team.
Culture notes
- Optiver says its engineers are real engineers, not just coders, who define business problems with traders.
- US developer roles are on-site, and postings say Optiver values in-person collaboration.
- Optiver says projects go live faster than at large tech firms.
Key takeaway: Expect to work next to traders and researchers on fast, low-error trading systems and to see your code reach production quickly.
Optiver quantitative developer levels and pay
Your level sets the bar you are interviewed against and the pay band of the offer.
Optiver Quantitative Developer Levels
Each level has different expectations, compensation, and interview focus.
What This Level Looks Like
Ten weeks with a mentor, shipping code to production; open campus postings were in London and Amsterdam.
Interview Focus at This Level
The online assessment, then behavioural and technical interviews, and possibly a final day.
Find your level
Practice with questions tailored to your target level.
Optiver publishes no US ladder. US postings use Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer, and Chicago Trading Strategies hires are described as senior engineers. Every US developer posting with pay lists the same $200,000 base, so the table uses posting titles.
Pay in Optiver's US job postings
Optiver's US developer postings show a single annual base figure, not a range. They add a global profit-sharing pool and a performance bonus on top.
| Posting | Location | US base salary range |
|---|---|---|
| 5 postings: C++ (HFT team), Equities/ETFs, Trading Strategies and others | Several US locations | $200K |
Senior Production Software Engineer is a production engineering role, shown for reference only. The Austin postings, including Senior Software Engineer C++, show no pay, and US campus postings were closed when we checked. Ranges seen October 29, 2026.
Optiver quantitative developer interview process
The stages follow Optiver's software engineer interview tips, its Europe recruitment FAQ and its postings. Optiver does not publish durations or question content. Those come from two US candidate reports from 2021 and 2022 and from candidate guides, so treat them as reported, not confirmed.
Screen
2 roundsOnline assessment
Optiver does not describe the content. A 2021 US report had two easy-to-medium algorithm questions, on binary trees and a date calculation. Candidate guides describe long object-oriented simulation problems followed by a multiple-choice section on data structures, operating systems, networking and databases, and one adds a cognitive section. They disagree on length: one says 75 to 90 minutes per long problem, another about 3 to 4 hours in total. They also disagree on the test platform.
Tips for this round
- Practice long object-oriented simulation problems under time pressure.
- Review data structures, operating systems, networking and databases for the multiple-choice part guides describe.
- Prepare first: there is no retake for 8 months.
Behavioural interview
Motivation, teamwork, how you handle challenges, and your other interview timelines. Optiver suggests the STAR method and practicing aloud.
Onsite
2 roundsTechnical interviews
Optiver says these cover coding, systems design and engineering problem solving and are not standard puzzle or brainteaser questions. Experienced Chicago hires start with a series of technical interviews. Reports describe implementing a queue class that does not resize its memory (2022), a systems design round loosely tied to processing trades and prices (2021 and 2022), and a discussion of the coding test (2021).
Tips for this round
- Practice data structures with fixed memory, such as a queue that never resizes.
- In design, ask about load, latency and edge cases before you draw.
- Treat hints as information and adjust your design out loud.
Meetings with engineers and leaders, or a final day
For experienced hires, this is team matching: Optiver works with you to choose the team, technology and problem space. Optiver does not state the length.
Tips to Stand Out
- Know one object-oriented language well (C++, Java or Python), including its standard library and collections.
- Know standard data structures, their space use and the time cost of key operations.
- Review computer architecture, networking, concurrency and memory management, and how they shape system design.
- In design rounds, ask about load, latency and edge cases, justify your choices, respond to hints and draw labelled diagrams.
- For the behavioural interview, reflect on real experiences, use STAR, practice aloud and stay authentic.
- Prepare well before starting the online assessment, since Optiver allows one attempt every 8 months.
Based on Optiver's own pages and candidate reports.
Optiver aims to contact candidates within 7 working days and gives no feedback in early stages because of volume. US experienced postings allow up to three applications per calendar year across all roles, and campus technology applicants who took an assessment or interviewed in the past 8 months must wait for the cool-off to end before reapplying. Last reviewed October 2026.
What is different at Optiver
- The title is Software Engineer. Optiver has no US Quantitative Developer title. The matching US roles are Software Engineer - C++ on the HFT team, Software Engineer - Trading Strategies, Software Engineer - Equities/ETFs and Software Engineer - Research Platform. The one Quantitative Developer posting, Pricing Data in Amsterdam, builds live pricing systems and historical replay frameworks, and shortlisted applicants go forward as Core Software Engineers and take the online assessment.
- Technical interviews are conversations. Optiver says they should feel like solving a problem with a colleague, not standard puzzles or brainteasers. It wants you to ask about load, latency and edge cases, justify your choices, respond to hints about flaws and draw labelled diagrams.
- You may choose your team late. Chicago Trading Strategies hires senior engineers across five teams: Research & Simulation, Low Latency Execution Strategy, Equity Options, Core Trading Strategies and Retail Execution. The team is matched during the interview process.
- Latency is measured in microseconds. Equities/ETF engineers build systems that react to US exchange market data in microseconds or less, price and hedge positions, and work closely with FPGA engineers on hardware acceleration. The HFT team runs ML models with low latency across thousands of futures and equities instruments.
- US roles are on-site. Postings say Optiver values in-person collaboration and that the roles are on-site in New York and Austin. Optiver describes Austin as its innovation hub for quant research, software and hardware engineering, and says it makes markets on more than 100 exchanges.
- Optiver does not publish a rule on AI use in interviews; ask your recruiter. The Amsterdam Career Kickstarter: Tech program includes AI-assisted development; that describes the work and says nothing about assessments.
Optiver quantitative developer interview questions
Questions from our bank, then practice prompts we wrote for this guide around Optiver's work.
Questions from our bank
From the DataInterview question bank: questions tagged to Optiver first, then questions that fit quantitative developer interviews. Open one to answer it.
Matching Heads Count
Sequential Search With Costly Sampling and Recall
Dominant Strategy in a Vickrey Auction
Red Blue Sock Equality
St Petersburg Paradox
Perfect Correlation Two
Doubly Stochastic Matrix
Low-latency and C++ practice
Prompts we wrote for this guide around Optiver's work. They are not reported interview questions. Each answer is an outline or a worked solution.
Implement a fixed-capacity queue class that never resizes its memory. What happens when it is full?
Sample Answer
Allocate an array of capacity N once. Keep a head index, a tail index and a count, or use N + 1 slots and compare indices. push writes at tail and advances tail = (tail + 1) % N; pop reads at head and advances head the same way. Both are O(1) with no allocation. When full, either reject the push and return false, overwrite the oldest entry, or block, and say which fits the use case. A power-of-two N lets you replace % with a bitmask.
Why is std::vector usually faster than std::list for a book of resting orders, even with inserts in the middle?
Two threads update a shared position map. What can go wrong, and how do you make it safe and fast?
What is the cost of a cache miss compared with an L1 hit, and how does it change how you write code?
Systems practice
Prompts we wrote for this guide around Optiver's work. They are not reported interview questions. Each answer is an outline or a worked solution.
Design a system that processes trades and price updates for an options desk and keeps positions and Greeks current.
Sample Answer
Ask first about load (messages per second), latency targets and what happens on bad data. Ingest trades and prices from separate feeds with sequence numbers. Keep positions in memory per underlying and recompute Greeks only for positions whose inputs changed. Publish updates to traders, and log every input so state can be rebuilt after a restart. Name the edge cases: late trades, corrected trades and a price feed that stops.
Design a historical replay framework that reproduces production pricing over years of data.
An exchange adds a new order type. Walk through how you would add support to an order gateway safely.
Design a research platform job scheduler for simulations and model training shared by many researchers.
Probability practice
Prompts we wrote for this guide around Optiver's work. They are not reported interview questions. Each answer is an outline or a worked solution.
You flip 3 fair coins. Given that at least one is heads, what is the chance all three are heads?
Sample Answer
P(at least one head) = 1 - 1/8 = 7/8 and P(all heads) = 1/8. So the conditional probability is (1/8) / (7/8) = 1/7.
A game pays the value of a fair die roll in dollars. You may pay $1 to reroll once. What is the best strategy and its expected value?
Orders arrive as a Poisson process at 10 per second. What is the probability of no orders in a given 100 milliseconds?
You draw 2 cards from a standard deck without replacement. What is the probability both are aces?
Behavioral practice
Prompts we wrote for this guide around Optiver's work. They are not reported interview questions. Each answer is an outline or a worked solution.
Tell me about a time a teammate pointed out a flaw in your design. What did you do?
Sample Answer
Optiver wants candidates who respond to hints about flaws. Use STAR: what the design was, what they saw, how you checked it and what you changed.
Describe a time you worked with a non-engineer to define the problem before building anything.
Tell me about a project you took from idea to production quickly.
Why market making, and why Optiver?
Practice problem: a price-time priority matching engine
pythonProcess limit orders (side, id, price, qty) in arrival order, where side is "B" or "S". An incoming order trades against the best opposite price first while prices cross, and against older orders first at the same price. Trades happen at the resting order's price. Any unfilled quantity rests in the book. Return (trades, (best_bid, best_ask)), where each trade is (buy_id, sell_id, price, qty) and a missing side is None. Example: [("S", 1, 101, 5), ("S", 2, 100, 3), ("B", 3, 101, 6), ("B", 4, 99, 2)] gives ([(3, 2, 100, 3), (3, 1, 101, 3)], (99, 101)).
1from typing import List, Optional, Tuple
2
3def match(orders: List[Tuple[str, int, int, int]]) -> Tuple[List[Tuple[int, int, int, int]], Tuple[Optional[int], Optional[int]]]:
4 """Return the trades and the final (best_bid, best_ask)."""
5 pass700+ coding problems with a live code executor.
Practice in the EngineHow to prepare
A plan for the Optiver loop, most important first:
- Pick one object-oriented language (C++, Java or Python) and know its standard library, collections and their costs well.
- Practice long object-oriented simulation problems and a CS multiple-choice review before the online assessment, which you get once every 8 months.
- Review computer architecture, networking, concurrency and memory management, as Optiver's tips ask.
- Practice systems design for trade and price processing out loud, with clarifying questions and labelled diagrams.
- Build fixed-memory data structures such as a circular queue and an order book, and explain their performance.
- Prepare STAR stories, practice them aloud and research how Optiver's teams work.
Practice path
Courses that cover the rounds above:
- Modern C++
- Data Structures and Algorithms
- Trading Systems Design
- System Design
- Probability for Quant Interviews
Are you ready for the Optiver quantitative developer interview?
1 / 6Can you solve a medium algorithm problem in C++ or Python in about 30 minutes, with tests?
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Optiver hire Quantitative Developers in the US?
Not under that title. Optiver's Quantitative Developer work in the US is posted as Software Engineer: C++ on the HFT team in New York and Austin, Trading Strategies in Chicago, Equities/ETFs in New York and the Research Platform in Chicago and Austin. Its only Quantitative Developer posting is in Amsterdam and is assessed as Core Software Engineer.
How much does an Optiver software engineer make?
US Software Engineer postings seen in October 2026 list a single base figure of $200,000 in New York and Chicago, plus a global profit-sharing pool and a performance bonus. The Austin postings show no pay, and US campus postings were closed when we checked.
Can I use AI tools in an Optiver interview?
Optiver does not publish a rule on AI use in interviews; ask your recruiter. Program pages that mention AI describe AI-assisted development on the job, not what is allowed in an assessment.
What is on the Optiver online assessment?
Optiver does not say. A 2021 US report had two easy-to-medium algorithm questions. Candidate guides describe long object-oriented simulation problems and a multiple-choice section on data structures, operating systems, networking and databases, but disagree on length and platform. Some campus postings require C++, C#, Python or Java experience for the technical assessment. You can take it only once every 8 months.
What internships and early-career programs does Optiver offer?
Open campus postings were in Europe when we checked: a 10-week Software Engineer Internship (2027 Start) in London with a mentor, which can lead to a full-time offer in London or Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam summer internship in July and August. Career Kickstarter: Tech is a five-day program in Amsterdam on 10 to 14 May 2027, and top performers may get a direct Graduate Software Engineer offer. Career Kickstarter: Women in Tech 2027 runs its assessment in January 2027 and interviews from late January to mid-February.
Do Optiver engineers work in the office?
Yes for the US roles in the postings: Optiver says it values in-person collaboration and the roles are on-site. Offices in the postings include Chicago, New York, Austin, Amsterdam, London, Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore. Postings do not state on-call duties for developer roles.
How is this different from a Senior Production Software Engineer or a Quantitative Researcher at Optiver?
A Senior Production Software Engineer in Chicago builds deployment pipelines, monitoring and automation for the trading production environment, mostly in Python. A Quantitative Researcher or Trader works on research and trading. The Software Engineer roles in this guide build the trading and research systems.
