Quantitative Researcher Internship - 2024-25 - Engineering

Ready to accelerate your career in a collaborative and dynamic environment? Want to challenge your skills and make a tangible impact on the financial markets? 

Discover how data and statistical modelling is used to optimise our trading strategies and improve the financial markets. You'll get to collaborate with and learn from the industry’s best to solve complex challenges that contribute towards our trading success. 

Plus, if you’ve excelled over the summer, you could receive an offer to return as a Graduate Quantitative Researcher.

Your summer of exponential growth starts today. Apply now.

Who we are

Optiver is a global tech-driven trading firm, with offices in Amsterdam, Sydney, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Chicago and Austin. Founded in 1986, today we are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world, united in our commitment to improve the market through competitive pricing, execution and risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world in various financial instruments we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets. We provide liquidity to financial markets using our own capital, at our own risk, trading a wide range of products: listed derivatives, cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign currencies.

Optiver’s Sydney office is one of the primary players within Asian markets, trading a range of products. Established in 1996, we're an active participant on the Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan exchanges, and act as Optiver’s APAC head office

What you’ll do

No previous experience in trading or financial markets? You bring the passion and we'll have the training to support you along the way.

Over the first few weeks, you'll be immersed in our renowned training program, which covers extensive trading principles and concepts. Once you’ve got the basics covered, you’ll put your knowledge into practice and work on a technical project within one of our research teams. Our experienced researchers will mentor and guide you through the process. 

By the end of the internship, you’ll have a solid theoretical and practical understanding of life as a Quantitative Researcher

Who you are

You’re an inquisitive, critical thinker who is creative in innovating new solutions. You're constantly keen to understand the “why” and you're a strong believer in the power of collaborative problem solving. 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, etc.).

We offer a range of opportunities in our research teams. During the internship, you will be allocated in to one of the following teams:

• D1 Researcher

As a D1 Researcher, you’ll collaborate with traders and developers to develop live trading strategies, using cutting-edge statistical and machine learning algorithms. You’ll build trading signals from market or fundamental data, combine signals and optimise strategy parameters through our state-of-the-art back testing infrastructure.

Whilst you'll use a mix of statistics, computer science and economics in your research, there are no textbook solutions to what you aim to solve. Instead, you’re driven to go beyond theory and search for hidden signals to help you create profitable strategies.

Check out Dom’s ‘Day in the life’ feature to learn more.

• Options Pricing Research

As an Options Pricing Researcher, you will get exposure to the full stack of our trading pipeline. Starting with trading systems, you will process the raw data into valuable market indicators or "alphas" that show market trends. This involves using statistics, creating visual representations, and dealing with large datasets. Next, you will make statistical models to predict financial outcomes such as future market movements or conditions.

You'll also be trained on how to develop strategies with traders. This involves finding new trading opportunities, codifying them into trading schemes, and thoroughly testing these strategies. You'll be involved in managing these strategies, which includes assessing risks, monitoring live performance, and comparing this to back test results.

Check out Noah’s ‘Day in the life’ feature to learn more.

• Performance and Strategy Researchers

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

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.

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.

Check out Rob’s ‘Day in the life’ feature to learn more.

What you’ll get

• The chance to work alongside diverse and intelligent peers in a rewarding environment
• Competitive remuneration
• 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
• Accommodation for the entirety of the internship, and flights were 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

• A penultimate or pre-penultimate year university student
• Studying a quantitative or technically focused degree, such as Maths, Statistics, Physics, Elec / Mechatronic / Software Engineering, Computer Science, Applied/Quantitative Finance or Econometrics.
• An Australian or New Zealand Citizen, Australian Permanent Resident or able to provide evidence of full working rights for the duration of the internship.

Ready to take your career to the next level? Apply today.

If you have any questions regarding this opportunity, please contact us at [email protected].