Quantitative Hardware Researcher

Optiver • Austin, TX

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Austin is home to Optiver’s main research, design and manufacturing facility for our custom trading system hardware. Fully understanding the components we use and the (exchange) environments in which our systems operate is critical to our success. We’re looking to expand the team with a quantitative researcher to help in hardware R&D.
With your quantitative skills and affinity for hardware, you’ll work with the engineers in the lab devising experiments, gathering data, running analysis and ultimately building an understanding of how things actually work. Using this knowledge to help to improve our designs, systems and the strategies that run upon them.

Requirements

• You have a strong understanding of quantitative analysis methods and have the ability to present findings to others
• You are grounded in physical reality; you have an understanding of how hardware works and have the ability to use this knowledge to form hypothesis, conduct physical experiments and draw conclusions from that
• You are comfortable working with Python and Jupyter notebooks
• You’re not afraid to be hands on in a datacenter lab environment
• An educational background in Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Computer Science, or similar (Masters/PhD preferred)
• A preference for working collaboratively with like-minded people
• A passion for solving problems and a drive for results

Nice To Haves

• Programming experience in low level languages such as C/C++ or VHDL is a strong plus
• Experience with (low-latency) networks and related hardware is a strong plus

Responsibilities

• Design, build and run experiments to characterize hardware such as switches, routers and trading systems at picosecond scales
• Work with execution researchers at all of our offices to understand real world vs lab performance of our trading systems and strategies
• Work with our software engineers in the lab to scale out and automate your research such that we can apply it at a global scale
• Be part of designing the next generation of systems and strategies which take your findings into account
• Your experience with lab measurements makes you a valuable resource for anyone looking at production data or trying to improve our production captures
• Help run the lab, make sure we have everything we need to run upcoming experiments and manage the queue of work
• Be involved with suppliers to test and understand next generation systems and measurement equipment

Benefits

• The opportunity to work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 40 different countries
• Highly competitive compensation package
• Global profit-sharing pool and performance-based bonus structure
• 401(k) match up to 50%
• Comprehensive health, mental, dental, vision, disability, and life coverage
• 25 paid vacation days alongside market holidays
• Extensive office perks, including breakfast, lunch and snacks, regular social events, clubs, sporting leagues and more

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level