Linux Engineer, Sydney

Who We Are

Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established 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

Our Linux engineering team ensures that our critical trading servers and infrastructure operate efficiently and reliably across the globe. In a highly customized, bare-metal environment powered by proprietary tools and technology, you’ll help design and implement cutting-edge solutions that enable scalable technological evolution while maintaining peak performance together with speed and precision.

As a Linux Engineer, your responsibilities will include:

• Designing, deploying, and managing the lifecycle of a large-scale fleet of Linux servers across multiple data centers, ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Architecting, building, and maintaining systems that drive efficiency and support Optiver’s evolving technology stack.
• Ensuring system reliability by swiftly resolving incidents and optimizing performance to meet trading demands, even during extreme market conditions.
• Researching and implementing new technologies or building enhanced in-house solutions to improve performance and system stability.
• Bridging the gap between hardware and software to ensure seamless interaction and integration.
• Optimizing system and kernel performance, including CPU affinity, NUMA balancing, HugePages, IRQ tuning, and other low-level configurations.
• Developing and maintaining automation tools using Python to enhance system efficiency.
• Monitoring system health and performance using observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager.
• Managing system provisioning and infrastructure deployment using Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Ansible and/or Terraform.
• Joining our rotating support and on-call roster to facilitate global trading operations.

Who You Are

• Experience in Linux engineering, debugging, administration, and OS system provisioning
• A solid understanding of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, TCP/UDP/multicast, and packet analysis.
• Hands-on experience with system/network tools such as EBPF, tcpdump, strace, ntp/ptp, lsof, nc.
• Experience with performance tuning at both the kernel and hardware level, including CPU pinning, cache optimizations, and BIOS/UEFI tuning.
• Experience with Linux security hardening techniques.
• Experience managing SAN storages.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, version control systems (Git), and PR-based workflows.
• Strong experience with monitoring and alerting tools like Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, and Alert Manager.
• Proficiency in Python for automating operational tasks and system administration.
• Ability to manage large projects, work collaboratively in a team, and communicate effectively to drive technical improvements.
• Willingness to learn new technologies, navigate frequent change, and contribute to a high-performance engineering environment.

What You'll Get

• A performance-based bonus structure unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool, fostering a truly collaborative environment.
• The chance to work alongside diverse and intelligent peers in a rewarding environment.
• Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities.
• Daily breakfast, lunch and an in-house barista.
• Gym membership plus weekly in-house chair massages.
• Regular social events, including a company trip every two years.
• Guided relocation, a competitive relocation package and visa sponsorship where necessary.

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, and welcome requests for reasonable adjustments during the process.

Questions? Get in touch with the recruitment team at careers@optiver.com.au.