Software Team Lead

Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established in 1986, today we are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world, united in our commitment to improve the market through competitive pricing, execution and risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world in various financial instruments we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets. We provide liquidity to financial markets using our own capital, at our own risk, trading a wide range of products: listed derivatives, cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign currencies.

Optiver's Sydney office is one of the primary players within Asian markets, trading a range of products. Established in 1996, we're an active participant on the Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan exchanges, and act as Optiver's APAC head office. 

We are looking for an experienced software engineer and team leader to lead our APAC Data Engineering Platform team. The team is responsible for developing Optiver's next-generation data platform for research and real-time trading, covering orchestration, storage, access and governance of data at scale. This team delivers robust, consistent solutions for a range of stakeholders across the business including engineers, researchers and traders. Our Data Engineers develop solutions using a mix of third-party and in-house technologies, owning their changes end-to-end including understanding the business problem, design, implementation, testing, deployment and monitoring.

As a leader you will be responsible for working with stakeholders across the company to define the team's strategy and roadmap, and you will execute that vision with your team. Your leadership will directly enable a faster, simpler, and more scalable innovation cycle for Optiver globally. You will also be responsible for building the team and growing engineers to reach their full potential. This is a hybrid leadership and engineering role with meaningful hands-on time across requirements, architecture, and code.

Other responsibilities include:

• Build and lead a high performance data engineering team, including managing performance, career development and delivery.

• Own and deliver the vision, strategy and roadmap for Optiver's data platform.

• Architect platform components (orchestration, storage/table formats, metadata/governance, streaming) that scale across APAC and integrate globally.

• Partner with stakeholders (research, trading, developers, SRE, security) to prioritise and achieve cross-team changes.

• Standardise ingestion and access workflows, including schema management, lineage, permissions and audit.

• Collaborate with our Europe & US offices to converge patterns and shared services.

• Contribute hands-on to key designs and production code. Uphold high engineering standards and best practices.

Optiver needs our next Data Team Lead to have:

• 7+ years experience as a Software Engineer delivering production platforms and 2+ years of experience leading software engineering teams.

• Strong experience with distributed systems & reliability fundamentals, including partitioning, replication, consistency/availability tradeoffs.

• Expertise with one or more of Python/C++/Java/Rust. Solid API and system design skills.

• Data platform fundamentals, including batch/stream processing, table formats, object storage, SQL.

• Understanding of security and governance, such as encryption, authentication, and access control.

• Practical experience with streaming and batch data (e.g., Kafka + Schema Registry).

• Experience making architectural decisions on IT solutions, system design & implementation.

• Excellent stakeholder communication and roadmap ownership.

You'll join a culture of collaboration and excellence, where you'll be surrounded by curious thinkers and creative problem solvers. Driven by a passion for continuous improvement, you'll thrive in a supportive, high-performing environment alongside talented colleagues, working collectively to tackle some of the most complex problems in the financial markets.

In return for your expertise, you will have access to a range of Optiver perks, including:

• A performance-based bonus structure unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool, fostering a truly collaborative environment.

• The chance to work alongside diverse and intelligent peers in a rewarding environment.

• Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities.

• Daily breakfast, lunch and an in-house barista.

• Gym membership plus weekly in-house chair massages.

• Regular social events, including a company trip every two years.

• Guided relocation, a competitive relocation package and visa sponsorship where necessary

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments during the process.