Quantitative Researcher Graduate (Feb 2024)

Do you want to make a tangible impact from day one?

Now is your opportunity to collaborate with world-class Traders and Software Engineers to improve financial markets in 50+ countries across the globe. This is your chance to demonstrate how valuable research and data are to the future of electronic trading.

Ready to test your limits? Join Optiver and accelerate your growth in a truly fascinating, high-performance environment.

Graduate Quantitative Researcher – PhD, POSTDOC 

WHO WE ARE

Optiver is a tech-driven trading firm and leading global market maker. For over 35 years, Optiver has been improving financial markets around the world, making them more transparent and efficient for all participants. With a focus on cutting-edge engineering, data science and research, we actively trade on 50+ exchanges, where we’re trusted to always provide accurate buy and sell pricing – no matter the market conditions. 

Optiver’s Sydney office is one of the primary players within Asian markets, trading a range of products. As an active participant in the Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan exchanges, we act as Optiver’s APAC head office.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

As our Graduate Quantitative Researcher, you’ll be constantly applying your top-tier analytical abilities to your day-to-day, creating insights and proposals that drive impactful new trading strategies.

Over the first 8 weeks, you’ll be immersed in our highly interactive training course, alongside Traders and Software Developers, to learn the ins and outs of quantitative trading. Once you’ve got the basics covered, you’ll join one of our Research teams, where you’ll be able to put your knowledge into practice and be given the autonomy to make decisions that create an immediate impact.

Every day will present you with new and interesting challenges to solve. And it’s up to you and your team to drive our success by ensuring that our quantitative models remain at the cutting-edge of constantly evolving capital markets.

WHO YOU ARE

You’re an inquisitive, critical thinker who is creative in innovating new solutions. When you are told that something “just is”, you immediately start to take it apart to understand the “why”. You’re a strong believer in the power of collaborative problem-solving. And you're excited to test yourself in one of the highest performing areas of the financial market. In addition, you:

• Are pragmatic and focused on outcomes
• Can communicate technical concepts well
• Enjoy utilising technology, programming or maths in your daily life to solve problems
• Possess programming experience in any language (C, C++, Python, Basic, Java)

While our Researchers all share a passion for creative quantitative problem solving, they work in three main areas with different focuses. In the application, you can select the role that appeals to you the most, and through the recruitment process, we will work together to ensure you find the area most suitable for you.  

• Performance and Strategy Research

Whether you join as a Graduate Strategy or Performance Researcher, you’ll be developing and testing hypotheses experimentally, under real-world conditions and constraints, to drive improvements in our trading systems.

As a Strategy Researcher, you’ll be leveraging our understanding of execution success and pricing to design and improve automated trading strategies. The scope of projects you’ll work on is broad, ranging from optimising strategy parameters to examining market data and finding new hidden market opportunities, to developing new strategies that capture these opportunities.

As a Performance Researcher, you’ll be using data science, reverse engineering, and computing fundamentals to improve the success of our trading systems. You could be building tools to optimise our low-latency strategies, utilising custom-built FPGA hardware, or analysing terabytes of systems and network capture data to process and discover hidden patterns.

• Delta 1 Research

As a Delta 1 (D1) Researcher, you’ll collaborate with traders and developers on live trading strategies using cutting-edge statistical and machine learning algorithms. You’ll work on building trading signals from the market or fundamental data, combine signals and optimise strategy parameters through our state-of-the-art backtesting infrastructure. Whilst the research uses a mix of statistics, computer science and economics, there are no textbook solutions to what you aim to solve. Instead, you’ll move beyond the theory to search for the hidden signals in the noise that’ll help you create profitable strategies. And that’s what makes it deeply rewarding.

• Options Pricing Research

As an Options Pricing Researcher, you’ll be responsible for the creation and improvement of our underlying pricing models, as well as increasing our statistical understanding of the underlying dynamics that impact the market. You’ll also work with Traders to create and improve volatility surfaces, yield curves, and other quantitative elements of our automated trading systems. You’ll find creative solutions to problems, test those solutions with historical parameters and market data, and then drive these changes in our trading system to improve our ability to make successful trades.

WHAT YOU'LL GET

• Up to $250,000 first year salary package (2024 start)
• The chance to work alongside diverse and intelligent peers in a rewarding environment
• 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
• Work-from-home allowance and support
• Guided relocation and a competitive relocation package where necessary.

As an intentionally flat organisation, we believe that great ideas and impact can come from everyone. We are passionate about empowering individuals and creating diverse teams that thrive. Every person at Optiver should feel included, valued and respected because we believe our best work is done together.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion 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.

ELIGIBILITY

• PhD or Postdoc graduated or studying a highly quantitative or technically focused degree, such as Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Electrical / Mechatronic / Software Engineering, Computer Science, Applied/Quantitative Finance or Econometrics.
• An Australian or New Zealand Citizen, Australian Permanent Resident or able to secure full working rights after graduating.

Does this sound like the future you’re looking for? Take up the challenge and pre-register today!

If you have any questions regarding this opportunity, please contact us at careers@optiver.com.au.