Kafka Engineer

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
We're looking for a skilled
Data Engineer with strong Kafka experience
to help design, build, and maintain our real-time data pipelines. You'll work closely with researchers and engineers to ensure the performance, reliability, and scalability of data systems that support our trading and research platforms.

This is a hands-on role with a focus on Kafka infrastructure, stream processing, and integration with our broader data architecture. You'll play a key role in shaping our data platform and ensuring we meet the growing demands of our business.

• Design and manage scalable Kafka-based data pipelines.
• Build and maintain Kafka producer/consumer libraries.
• Monitor and optimise Kafka performance, latency, and reliability.
• Collaborate with teams to integrate streaming pipelines into research workflows.
• Implement access control, authentication, and encryption for Kafka.
• Support disaster recovery planning and production stability.
• Deliver data to S3 and support lakehouse ingestion.
• Document systems and share Kafka best practices across teams.
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and recommend improvements.

Who You Are
Must-Haves

• 3+ years of experience in data engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka in production.
• Solid understanding of Kafka architecture and components.
• Experience deploying, scaling, and monitoring Kafka clusters.
• Proficient in Python.
• Experience in Linux environments.
• Good understanding of networking and security best practices.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Kafka Streams or Kafka Connect.
• Familiarity with tools like Spark, Flink, or Beam.
• Exposure to cloud-based Kafka (e.g., AWS MSK, Confluent Cloud).
• Knowledge of IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Interest in trading systems or financial data.

What You'll Get
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 be offered a competitive salary package as well as access to a range of Optiver perks, including:

• The chance to work alongside best-in-class professionals
• Competitive remuneration, including an attractive bonus structure and additional leave entitlements
• Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities
• Gym membership plus weekly in-house chair massages
• Daily breakfast, lunch and an in-house barista
• Regular social events including an annual company trip

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion, and it is hardwired through every stage of our hiring process. We encourage applications from candidates from any and all backgrounds, and we welcome requests for reasonable adjustments during the process to ensure that you can best demonstrate your abilities.

Questions? Get in touch with the recruitment team