Software Engineer - Research Infrastructure

In this role, you will build the Quantitative Research framework at the core of Optiver’s systematic cash equities business. You’ll enable researchers and traders to model, backtest, and deploy trading ideas across global markets, from research through production. You will collaboration-wide effects by creating scalable data, simulation, and distribution systems that power fast, reliable experimentation. Your work directly shapes desk research, strategy deployment, and live trading outcomes, within a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

• performance-based bonus
• global team across 50+ countries
• 25–30 days vacation
• training opportunities
• health insurance discounts
• fully paid commuting expenses

• Develop and extend the simulation framework for researching and running systematic cash equities strategies (stocks and ETFs).
• Build distributed systems to scale backtesting and model training across cloud and on‑premise environments.
• Curate high-quality research datasets by combining live and historical market data for reproducible experiments.
• Collaborate with researchers to translate requirements into robust, production-ready software.
• Improve tools and workflows to accelerate experimentation, validation, and deployment of strategies.
• Apply modern AI tools where they add value across research and software development lifecycle.

• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience building simulation, backtesting, or other large-scale computational frameworks.
• Experience in systematic trading, HFT, or quantitative finance is advantageous.
• Experience designing and building large-scale, distributed or real-time systems.
• Experience using Python in research, data-intensive or analytical environments.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a focus on reliable, maintainable production code.

• Collaborative mindset
• Problem-solving orientation
• Strong communication with researchers and traders
• Python (strong)
• C++ (performance-critical systems)
• Data pipelines (Spark, Polars, Airflow)