Production Operations Engineering Team Lead

Optiver's Global Production Operations Engineering team is at the heart of our real-time trading systems, ensuring they operate with the highest levels of reliability, performance, and scalability. As Team Lead, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping how we manage our production environment across APAC and globally — combining hands-on technical leadership with strategic oversight to drive operational excellence.

This role offers the unique opportunity to lead a high-performing team of engineers responsible for evolving the platforms that power Optiver's low-latency trading operations. Your leadership will directly impact system resilience, incident response, automation, and business performance in high-stakes markets. Trading at Optiver requires bulletproof infrastructure — and your team will be the one keeping it that way. This is your chance to drive meaningful change in a globally distributed, high-impact environment where engineering excellence directly fuels business success.

WHO WE ARE

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. 

WHAT YOU'LL DO

As a hands-on leader, you'll be responsible for:

• Leading and developing a world-class team of Production Operations Engineers, including hiring, coaching, and fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous learning.

• Driving strategy and execution across our global trading production environment, ensuring system uptime, scalability, and performance — especially during peak market activity.

• Designing and managing global support coverage, including a follow-the-sun model to ensure 24/7 reliability and seamless handovers across regions.

• Establishing operational standards including SLAs, KPIs, and control frameworks that ensure discipline, audit-readiness, and high service quality.

• Owning the incident lifecycle — from real-time response to root cause analysis and long-term remediation — embedding lessons learned into processes and tooling.

• Leading improvements in automation, deployment workflows, and monitoring, reducing manual effort and increasing system robustness and agility.

• Ensuring production readiness for new exchanges, trading strategies, and infrastructure changes, coordinating across development, trading, and infrastructure teams.

• Managing colocation environments and ensuring adequate redundancy, performance headroom, and operational capacity planning.

• Contributing technically to platforms, tools, and processes that enhance operational leverage, observability, and fault tolerance.

• Representing the team in leadership forums, advocating for production priorities, and aligning team objectives with broader business goals.

WHO YOU ARE

You are a pragmatic, calm, and strategic engineering leader who thrives in high-performance, mission-critical environments. You know how to balance operational safety with system performance, and people leadership with technical ownership.

• Proven success leading technical operations, SRE, or production engineering teams in real-time or low-latency environments.

• Strong organizational skills with experience managing multi-region support and coordinating global rosters.

• Skilled communicator who can align business and technical stakeholders, provide clarity under pressure, and drive cross-functional collaboration.

• Passionate about coaching, developing, and retaining top engineering talent.

• Deep expertise in Linux-based distributed systems, ideally in capital markets, trading, or similarly fast-paced environments.

• Strong proficiency in scripting and automation tools (e.g., Python, Bash), CI/CD pipelines, and observability systems.

• Demonstrated experience defining and managing SLAs/SLOs, with a data-driven approach to improving reliability and performance.

• Comfortable leading incident response in high-pressure scenarios and building systems that prevent recurrence.

• Experience with colocation infrastructure, system tuning, and real-time telemetry is highly valuable.

• Exposure to high-frequency trading or low-latency financial systems is a strong plus.

WHAT YOU'LL GET

• 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.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT

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

Questions? Get in touch with the recruitment team