Just finished walking recently Optiver I went through the whole recruitment process of SDE New Grad and successfully got the offer. Let me share my complete experience and useful information with you. Although Optiver's school recruitment process is not particularly long, each level is unique and requires very high engineering capabilities, computer basics, and soft skills.
Recruitment Process Overview
- Online Written Exam (OA): The most difficult level, the total duration is about 3 hours and 20 minutes
- HR behavioral aspect (BQ): 45 minutes, all in English
- System Design Interview: 1-2 rounds, focusing on high concurrency and low latency trading system design
The whole interview process
HR session (BQ behavioral session, 45 minutes)
The whole process is in English, with about a dozen questions, focusing on soft skills, job search motivation and understanding of the industry. High-frequency questions are as follows:
- HR self-introduction + introduction to Optiver company
- Candidate self-introduction
- Why Optiver? (Why choose Optiver)
- What is market making? (What is a market maker)
- What is the most important quality for an engineer? (What is the most important quality for an engineer)
- What is the 3 most important soft skills for an engineer?
- Among the three, which one are you the worst at? (Which of the three skills is your weakest at?)
- Based on what you said, what are you advice for engineers? (Based on your answer, what are your advice for engineers?)
- Which soft skill have you invested the most in? (Which soft skill have you invested the most in?)
- What do you do when someone on your team has a different perspective from you? (What do you do when someone on your team has a different perspective from you?)
- What is the biggest challenge you’ve encountered?
- Other interviews and offers
- The three most important things when looking for a job
Side 2: System Design System Design
- Core focus: basic computer knowledge + system design capabilities, which need to be combined with specific project cases and at the same time have an in-depth understanding of Optiver's corporate culture and business (market makers, high-frequency trading systems).
- Follow-up links: After passing this round, there will be a more complex system design interview to examine the design capabilities of high-concurrency, low-latency, and high-availability systems to fit Optiver's trading system scenarios.
OA Coding questions
Topic 1: Stock dividend price calculation
A class needs to be implemented to support:
- UpdateDividend(i, A, D): Update the i-th dividend information
- CalculateFuturePrice(F): Calculate the future price of the stock after day F (subject to deducting dividends issued)
Core idea:
- Because there are few update operations (≤500 times) and many queries (≤10⁵ times), it is suitable to use appropriate data structures to maintain dividend information.
- It is recommended to maintain a structure sorted by day or use prefix sums to speed up queries.
Topic 2: Worst deal calculation
Process transaction flow and price updates, and query the transaction ID with the largest current loss (lowest PNL) for a certain target.
Core idea:
- Maintain transaction records for each InstrumentID
- Calculate PNL = (current market price – transaction price) × direction × quantity
- When querying, find the transaction with the smallest PNL (if there is no loss, output "NO BAD TRADES")
Optiver SDE New Grad Exam Preparation Suggestions & Tips
- Coding part: Don’t just brush up on LeetCode, practice more large-scale OOP design questions, and pay attention to code specifications and boundary processing.
- Basic knowledge: Focus on reviewing OS concurrency and computer network stereotypes, especially TCP/IP related content.
- Zap-N test: Find similar cognitive games to practice in advance to improve your reaction speed.
- BQ interview: Prepare 3-5 true stories in advance. True answers are the most important.
- System design: Be familiar with the market maker business and prepare for low-latency, high-concurrency, and high-availability trading system design.
Optiver's interviews are generally more practical in engineering, requiring high code quality and basic knowledge, but the interviewers are relatively friendly. If you are also preparing for school recruitment at Optiver, Jane Street, Citadel and other quantitative trading companies, you need the complete code implementation of the two programming questions of OA, the system design reference plan, or you want to learn more Interview assistance Plan, feel free to message me privately.
I wish you all can get your ideal offer as soon as possible!
