Fantastic challenges, depressing technical management - Engineer Optiver Employee Review

3.0
Jun 3, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Technical problems are challenging and interesting. Colleagues are very smart people and the atmosphere is culturally rich. Salary and benefits are above the norm.

Cons

Technical management is quite young and with a notable exception they all started their career at Optiver; as a consequence they believe there is no other way to solve technical problems than "the single Optiver way" and cannot even consider that there are different problems which require different solutions. There's a bit of a herd approach in designing systems and applications, and straying from the path is frowned upon even when the advantages of doing so are clear or might be worth a shot. These issues are lately being exacerbated by narrowed diversity in technical recruitment, populating the engineering ranks with clones of the team leads.

Explore other reviews about Optiver

5.0
Feb 24, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

worked on a lot of different areas of the trading stack; often close with researchers learned about technical components for data driven trading saw my impact day to day

Cons

constant office renovations were a bit distracting, but was told it should be done in 2026

3.0
May 21, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good compensation, collaborative environment. Company also seems to aim to be at forefront of new tech such as AI

Cons

When HR mgmt is on record stating things like the company shouldn’t hire females anymore, it really makes you wonder how they make decisions on who should fill management positions

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