Data Operations Engineer

Optiver is a leading global market maker, powered by technology, rigorous research, and deep collaboration. As markets grow more data-driven and competitive, our ability to ingest, monitor, and deliver high-quality data at scale is fundamental to maintaining our trading edge.

We’re looking for a Data Reliability Engineer (Data SRE) to join our Global Data Engineering team in London, with a dedicated focus on supporting our Trading teams. This role combines hands-on engineering with high-impact operations.

You will spend a meaningful portion of your time on L1 support responding to user issues, addressing data quality concerns, working with vendors, and managing alerts—and the remainder on L2 responsibilities, including integrating new datasets, configuring quality controls, and ensuring our pipelines and APIs are robust, scalable, and production-ready.

• Serve as a frontline data operations point of contact for traders, researchers, and other internal users.

• Investigate and resolve data quality issues and freshness anomalies across critical datasets.

• Monitor ingestion pipelines, scheduled processes, and real-time feeds—triaging and addressing alerts promptly to minimize data-related impact on trading.

• Communicate directly with external data vendors to resolve upstream issues, clarify specification changes, and ensure timely delivery of accurate datasets.

• Provide clear, timely updates to users during incidents, ensuring transparency and rapid resolution.

• Ingest, configure, and operationalize new datasets—including schema mapping, normalization, historical backfill, and metadata management.

• Develop and maintain robust data pipelines (ETL/ELT) that feed both real-time trading and analytical research systems.

• Implement data quality checks, anomaly detection, and monitoring frameworks to proactively identify and prevent issues.

• Model and normalize complex financial datasets so they are clean, structured, and reliable for downstream systems.

• Build and maintain high-performance APIs that expose market and reference data to trading, research, and analytics platforms.

• Partner closely with traders, researchers, and engineering teams to understand evolving data needs and design reliable, scalable solutions.

• Contribute to the architecture and evolution of Optiver’s global data platform, ensuring it meets the growing demands of data-intensive trading strategies.

• Uphold operational excellence by driving improvements to our data monitoring and alerting systems.

• 3+ years of experience in a Data Engineer, SRE, Software Engineer, or Data Operations role in a high-performance or time-sensitive environment.

• Strong proficiency in Python, including libraries such as Pandas, Arrow, and Spark.

• Solid understanding of data modeling, normalization, and API development for large-scale analytical or trading systems.

• Experience with lakehouse architectures (e.g., Delta Lake, Databricks, AWS) for managing large, high-quality analytical datasets is preferred.

• Exposure to real-time and historical market data (e.g., fixed income/Credit, ETFs, equities) is a plus.

• Strong operational instincts: you take ownership of issues, communicate clearly under pressure, and care deeply about system reliability.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, especially when working with traders, researchers, and other technologists in a fast-paced environment.

Who we are 

At Optiver, our mission is to continuously improve the market. By providing liquidity and accurate pricing in various financial instruments, to multiple exchanges across the world, we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets.

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. Motivated by a passion for continuous improvement, you’ll thrive in a supportive, high-performing environment alongside talented colleagues, working collectively to tackle the toughest problems in the financial markets.

In addition, you’ll receive:

• A performance-based bonus structure, enabling all of our employees to benefit from our global profit pool.
• 27 paid vacation days plus all UK public holidays.
• Daily breakfast and lunch, along with support on commuting expenses.
• Private medical insurance, pension scheme, and ClassPass fitness membership.
• Training and continuous learning opportunities, including access to conferences and tech events.
• International transfer opportunities for global career growth.

How to apply

Are you interested in furthering your career on one of the most dynamic and exciting trading floors in Europe? 

Apply directly via the form below. If you have any questions feel free to contact our Recruitment team via recruitment inquiry form.

Please note:

• We do not require any assistance from third-parties including agencies in the recruitment of this role
• We cannot accept applications via email

Diversity statement

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion.