Optiver software engineer candidates report long, design-heavy online assessments followed by coding, systems or object-oriented design, and behavioral conversations. Prepare to reason clearly about performance and implementation tradeoffs.
$196K
Avg. Base Comp
$394K
Avg. Total Comp
6 rounds
Typical Rounds
2-4 weeks
Process Length
Optiver software engineer interviews reported here place unusual weight on turning dense requirements into clean, efficient implementations. Several candidates describe a lengthy online assessment that combines coding with logic, games, aptitude questions, or computer-science fundamentals. Coding prompts may resemble object-oriented or low-level design exercises rather than short algorithm questions. One recent assessment asked candidates to manage cells that expire over time and must be removed from racks; fully reading the specification affected the appropriate data-structure choice.
Later interviews can include live coding, object-oriented design, architecture, debugging, and system-design discussions. Reported exercises include designing a queue with a circular buffer, implementing a scheduler, creating shopping or checkout systems, and reasoning about exchange-related systems. Follow-up questions may test complexity, scalability, networking, lower-level representation, or how a design behaves under changing requirements. Long prompts and open-ended design questions make clarification and careful requirement parsing especially important.
Prepare behavioral examples about your background, feedback, disagreements, projects, and motivation for Optiver and software engineering. Practice explaining a recent project in nontechnical language as well as defending its technical design. Candidate paths vary substantially: some ended after the assessment or an early technical interview, while others continued through several coding and design conversations. Focus on readable, reusable code and explain correctness and performance tradeoffs as you work.
Synthesized from 31 candidate reports by our editorial team.
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Featured question at Optiver
Given a list of integers, and an integer N, write a function to find all combinations that sum to the value N.
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Synthesized from candidate reports. Individual experiences may vary.
Candidates report a lengthy online assessment that may mix coding with CS multiple choice, logic or math games, and cognitive tasks. Software prompts have included object-oriented design, low-level order-book operations, and expiry-based data handling; read the full specification before selecting a data structure and articulate why it meets the constraints.
Candidates report an early recruiter or behavioral conversation covering logistics, résumé experience, motivation, and why Optiver or software engineering. Prepare concise project explanations, a specific account of feedback you acted on, and a clear connection between your interests and the role.
Candidates report live coding, object-oriented design, debugging, and system-design discussions. Examples include a circular-buffer queue, LRU cache, order-book behavior, schedulers, and auction or trading-system designs. Expect follow-up questions on correctness, complexity, memory, and how the solution changes under larger-scale constraints.
Some candidates report multiple later technical conversations or an onsite with whiteboarding and system design, while others describe mixed technical-behavioral virtual interviews. Systems topics may include networking, operating systems, cache locality, garbage collection, and concurrency; explain assumptions and tradeoffs as you proceed.
