Optiver Interview Questions & Process (2025 Guide)
Introduction
Optiver interview questions often reflect the company’s dynamic growth and leadership in global markets. Optiver continues to impress as a global market maker, posting a remarkable net profit of €1.369 billion in 2024—a solid 18% increase from the previous year. With trading income surging by 26% to nearly €3.5 billion and strategic expansions in China, India, and the US, Optiver remains at the forefront of market liquidity and technological innovation. Their recent appointment of Lance Braunstein as Global CTO and growing US presence through a new Chicago office signal a clear commitment to scaling their operations with cutting-edge tech and market reach.
The interview process for 2025 has been revamped to match that same agility. Optiver now offers rolling applications and multiple start dates, so you don’t have to wait around once you’re ready. Whether you’re applying for a graduate position or an internship, the process is designed to be dynamic and region-specific, with an eye towards identifying candidates who thrive in fast-moving, global environments. So, get ready for a journey that’s as intense and rewarding as the markets they dominate.
In this Optiver Interview Guide for 2025, we’ll strive to explore why work at Optiver, what has changed in its 2025 process, and primarily the questions that you might be asked during the upcoming interview.
Why Work at Optiver?
Working at Optiver offers more than just a job—it provides the opportunity to work on high-stakes problems in a fast-moving environment where your impact is tangible.
Competitive Compensation and Bonuses
When it comes to why people want to work at Optiver, competitive compensation is one of the biggest draws. Multiple insiders confirm that new graduates, especially in Europe, “get a little over 200k€ their first year including the bonuses,” with many noting that salaries typically “settle between 250k€ and 400k€.”
Compensation in the US market is even more competitive. One insider points out that full-time new grad pay is around $350k to $390k, and by year five, you “should be making north of 1-3m (assuming you didn’t get canned).”
Optiver’s bonus system is highly meritocratic and sometimes unpredictable. An insider explains, “Optiver has a great profit-sharing program; the reason they aren’t being transparent is that it’s very much meritocratic, so it’s hard to predict how many marbles you’ll get.”
Impact-Driven Work
One of the biggest reasons people choose Optiver is the trust and real impact they get to make early in their careers. For example, one Optiverian shared that within just over a year, they were managing “a very large and significant trading spot” and even leading a team after driving major technology upgrades.
Interns also jump straight into high-stakes work. An Amsterdam intern described participating in a critical project to predict one-day-out volatility, where everyone “brought a unique perspective, skill set, and approach.”
At its core, Optiver’s mission is about improving financial markets, which ultimately “lowers the cost of trading for other market participants.”
Tech-First Trading Culture
At Optiver, technology isn’t just a tool—it powers everything the firm does. Engineers and traders truly work as one team, developing pricing models and algos. It’s common to hear how you might “be working on a change to a trading system in the morning and see it running live in the afternoon,” reflecting the fast feedback loop and close collaboration. Engineers take full ownership of projects, driven by a passion to “solve problems which really matter to the business” and pride in the quality of their work.
Global Opportunities
Optiver’s truly global presence means employees collaborate daily with talented professionals from over 40 countries across offices, in a culture of “collaboration and excellence.” Career mobility is a real advantage, with opportunities to move between regions and roles. Many note that if you have “thick skin and a strong work ethic,” Optiver can be an excellent place to grow and explore new challenges.
What's Optiver's Interview Process Like?
The hiring process at Optiver is fast-paced, multi-step, and varies by role, but there are some consistent stages you should expect.
Typical Interview Process:
- Online Assessment (HackerRank or Custom Test)
- Technical or Quantitative Interview
- Behavioral Interview
- System Design or Onsite Round
- Final HR or Cultural Fit Interview
Online Coding or HackerRank Assessment
Optiver’s online coding assessment for software engineering roles is delivered via HackerRank and has become notably more challenging in 2025. Candidates are given two object-oriented programming (OOP) design problems to solve in 120 minutes, both described as “very lengthy” and structurally complex. These tasks often require combining data structures like hash maps, heaps, and doubly linked lists, with one candidate admitting the first problem alone took them 90 minutes, leaving just enough time to “draw some shapes” for the second. Importantly, Python is not permitted.
The assessment isn’t just about correctness, it evaluates time and space complexity, coding style, and design rationale. As one participant emphasized, “the most competitive applicants” produce clean, reusable code with minimal complexity. Optiver sees the test as a reflection of its values: fast thinking, high standards, and practical problem-solving.
Technical & Quantitative Interviews
Optiver’s interviews are designed to mirror the fast, collaborative nature of the work itself, blending technical depth with real-time decision-making. Software engineering candidates face applied problems in data structures, system design, and object-oriented programming, where “selecting the right data structures is a priority,” given Optiver’s performance-driven systems. A solid grasp of computer architecture, concurrency, and memory management is also expected. After all, “We [Optiver] assess more than your coding skills… we’re looking to see if you can think critically, adapt quickly and communicate your ideas clearly.”
For trading and quantitative roles, candidates report classic brainteasers like the “37 horses” logic puzzle and Fermi problems, such as estimating the number of autorickshaws in Mumbai. The pace is intentionally demanding, with “fast-paced mental calculation questions” that require accuracy without pen and paper.
Behavioral and Cultural Interviews
Optiver’s behavioral interviews are structured more like conversations than interrogations, designed to assess how you think, communicate, and collaborate under pressure. “It’s not about having all the answers; it’s about how you break down complexity, adapt to new information and communicate your reasoning.” You’ll discuss past teamwork, challenges, and how you’d handle conflict in a fast-paced environment, demonstrating self-awareness and professionalism.
Cultural fit is just as important. Be prepared to resonate with: “We [Optiver] want to understand what drives you, how you work in a team and how you approach challenges.” Authenticity matters more than polished answers, so use real examples and structure them clearly.
System Design Interview
Optiver’s system design interviews for mid-to-senior engineers focus heavily on practical, hardware-aware solutions with an emphasis on real-time, low-latency performance. Candidates often design systems resembling actual Optiver infrastructure and optimize for nanosecond-level latency and extremely high throughput.
Strong networking knowledge is essential, especially understanding TCP vs. UDP tradeoffs, with one candidate explaining how interviewers wanted justification for choosing UDP despite its unreliability. Hardware details matter too— “be ready for back-of-the-envelope math estimating RAM, CPU, or NIC specs to support a 10 Gbps link.” Scalability and fault tolerance questions may push you to discuss load balancing, redundancy, and failure scenarios, with advice to “build a high-level overview first, then dive into specifics,” and to “avoid over-engineering by breaking problems into smaller steps.”
Role-Specific Variations
Check out other Optiver interview questions and guides:
Most Common Optiver Interview Questions
Most Common Optiver Interview Questions
This section includes common questions across multiple roles at Optiver, from interns to senior engineers. We group them by themes and point you to full interview guides when relevant.
Behavioral & Culture Fit Questions
These questions help Optiver assess how you respond under pressure, collaborate in high-performance teams, and align with their values of ownership, adaptability, and continuous improvement:
1. Describe a specific instance where you went above and beyond.
At Optiver, going above and beyond is crucial in a high-stakes trading environment where proactive problem-solving can directly impact outcomes. Use this question to highlight your dedication, creativity, or initiative in a previous role. Emphasize how your actions led to measurable improvements or innovative solutions relevant to Optiver’s culture of excellence.
Optiver values constructive conflict resolution-essential in fast-paced, collaborative teams. Share a story where you addressed disagreements professionally, focusing on open communication and finding mutually beneficial solutions. Relate your approach to maintaining team performance under pressure, a key aspect of Optiver’s environment.
3. Explain how to prioritize and stay organized with multiple deadlines.
At Optiver, the ability to manage competing priorities and deadlines is critical for success. Discuss your methods for assessing urgency and importance, breaking down projects, and using tools or frameworks to stay organized. Connect your answer to Optiver’s need for efficiency and reliability in a dynamic trading context.
4. Tell me about a time when you used data to solve a problem.
Optiver’s data-driven culture means leveraging analytics to make impactful decisions. Share a concrete example where you identified a business problem, analyzed data, and implemented a solution that drove results. Emphasize how this mindset aligns with Optiver’s mission to improve markets through technology and data.
5. Tell me about a time you received critical feedback. How did you respond, and what did you do afterward?
When receiving critical feedback, it’s important to remain open-minded and view it as an opportunity for growth. Acknowledge the feedback, reflect on its validity, and take actionable steps to improve. Demonstrating a positive response to feedback shows your commitment to personal and professional development.
Technical and Coding Questions
These questions test your ability to write efficient, clean code under time pressure—an essential skill at Optiver, where milliseconds matter and high-performance systems depend on thoughtful implementation:
6. Write a function to parse the most frequent words.
To parse the most frequent words in a list of sentences, convert all words to lowercase and use a dictionary to count occurrences. Then, create another dictionary where keys are frequencies and values are lists of words with those frequencies.
7. Given a stream of numbers, select a random number from the stream with equal probability
To select a random number from a stream with equal probability, use reservoir sampling. This involves maintaining a single selected number and updating it with a probability of 1/count as new numbers are processed, ensuring each number has an equal chance of being selected.
To solve this, iterate through the list of timestamps and group them into sublists where each sublist contains timestamps that fall within a 7-day period starting from the first timestamp. Continue this process until all timestamps are grouped.
To solve this, first tokenize the paragraph into words and count the frequency of each word using a dictionary or a Counter from the collections module. Then, sort the words by frequency and return the top N words along with their frequencies.
To solve this, iterate through each sublist, sort it, and select the fifth-largest element. Collect these elements and sort them to return the final list in ascending order.
To solve this problem, iterate through the list of prices while keeping track of the minimum price encountered so far and the maximum profit possible with one transaction. Then, calculate the maximum profit possible with two transactions by iterating backward and updating the maximum profit at each step. The final result is the maximum profit achievable with at most two transactions.
12. Find the longest increasing subsequence in a list of integers
To solve this problem, iterate through the list of integers while maintaining a dynamic programming array that stores the length of the longest increasing subsequence ending at each index. Update this array by comparing each element with previous elements and updating the subsequence length accordingly. The maximum value in this array will be the length of the longest increasing subsequence.
System Design & Optimization
These questions assess your ability to design scalable, low-latency systems, critical at Optiver, where real-time decision-making and performance optimization directly impact trading outcomes:
13. How would you create a schema to represent client click data on the web?
To create a schema for client click data, you should include fields such as user ID, session ID, timestamp, page URL, and click coordinates. This schema will help in tracking user interactions and analyzing user behavior on the web app.
To add a column to a table with a billion rows without affecting user experience, consider using a phased approach. First, add the column with a default value, then backfill the data in small batches during off-peak hours to minimize impact on performance.
15. Design a data pipeline for hourly user analytics
To build this data pipeline, you would need to extract data from the data lake, transform it to calculate hourly, daily, and weekly active users, and then load it into a system that supports real-time dashboard updates. This could involve using tools like Apache Spark for processing and a database like PostgreSQL or a data warehouse like Snowflake for storage and querying.
16. Describe your approach to designing a real-time risk management dashboard for traders.
Identify key risk metrics and required data sources for real-time monitoring. Propose an architecture for low-latency data ingestion, processing, and visualization. Discuss scalability, alerting, and user interface considerations.
17. How would you design a system to detect and respond to latency spikes in real-time?
To design a system for detecting and responding to latency spikes, implement real-time monitoring tools that track latency metrics across the system. Use alerting mechanisms to notify when latency exceeds thresholds and employ automated scaling or rerouting strategies to mitigate the impact, ensuring system performance remains stable.
OA & HackerRank Prep
These questions are designed to evaluate your algorithmic thinking, SQL fluency, and attention to edge cases—all under tight time constraints that mirror the speed and precision expected at Optiver:
18. Write a query to get the number of customers that were upsold
To determine the number of customers that were upsold, identify users who made more than one purchase on different days. This involves grouping transactions by user and filtering for those with multiple purchase dates, then counting these users.
19. Given the transactions table, write a query that finds the third purchase of every user.
To find the third purchase of every user, you can use a window function like ROW_NUMBER() to assign a sequential number to each purchase per user, ordered by the purchase time and id. Then, filter the results to only include rows where this sequential number is 3, indicating the third purchase.
To solve this, join the transactions table with the users table to access both user names and orders. Use CASE WHEN statements combined with SQL’s SUM function to count transactions for each user in 2019 and 2020. Group by user ID and filter with a HAVING clause to select users with more than three transactions in both years.
To solve this, join the accounts and downloads tables on account_id, filter for accounts with at least one download, and group by download_date and paying_customer. Calculate the average downloads for each group and round the result to two decimal places.
22. Write a SQL query to find the average number of right swipes for different ranking algorithms
To solve this, join the swipes and variants tables on user_id, filter users who have swiped at least 10 times, and group by variant and swipe_threshold. Calculate the average of is_right_swipe for each group to get the mean number of right swipes, and count the number of users in each group.
Tips When Preparing for an Optiver Interview
Optiver values speed and precision. Use platforms like LeetCode and HackerRank to simulate coding under time pressure. Focus on data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design with an emphasis on performance.
Trading interviews often involve rapid arithmetic and probability questions without a calculator. Practice estimation, percentage changes, and combinatorics to build speed and accuracy under stress.
Familiarize yourself with proprietary trading and the role of low-latency systems in market making. Knowing why performance matters in real-time trading environments shows you’re aligned with Optiver’s technical goals.
Structure your answers with Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Be concise, specific, and focus on how your decisions reflect adaptability, collaboration, and ownership—core values at Optiver.
Reddit offers useful prep tips, especially around technical depth and interview pacing. Use these as guidance, but verify details with official sources like Optiver’s careers site or recruiters. Also, feel free to use our Mock Interview and AI Interview to refine your approaches.
Salaries at Optiver
Average Base Salary
Average Total Compensation
Conclusion
Optiver is one of the most competitive and rewarding places to work in the trading and tech world. Whether you’re just starting your career or looking for your next big leap, understanding the SQL Interview questions and how our other candidates like Hoda Noorian succeeded in the hiring process will give you a serious edge. Moreover, if you’re applying for a data-centric role, the Modeling and Machine Learning Tutorial may help. All the best!
FAQs
What is the Optiver interview process like?
Expect a rigorous sequence of online tests, technical interviews, and behavioral screens. The process varies slightly by role.
Are Optiver behavioral interviews hard?
They are structured and fast-paced, with a focus on ownership, clarity, and decision-making under pressure.
How do I prepare for the Optiver coding assessment?
Start with HackerRank problems in arrays, greedy algorithms, and timing constraints. Focus on writing clean, efficient code quickly.
What system design questions are asked at Optiver?
Expect questions around latency optimization, real-time processing, and scalability—especially for backend or infra roles.
What roles does Optiver hire for the most?
Software engineers, data scientists, and trading interns make up the bulk of their hiring pipeline.