C++ Software Engineer – Critical Engineering

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 We are looking for experienced software engineers to join Critical Engineering APAC team in Sydney — the platform group that builds and operates the systems Optiver's trading stack runs on. Every day, our trading platform processes huge volumes of data, prices thousands of financial instruments and makes millions of trading decisions, all in a safe, deterministic, real-time manner. The systems you will own sit underneath that platform, spanning real-time risk controls, reference data, trade-lifecycle infrastructure and trading-integrity systems. You will work hands-on in C++ on globally distributed services, partner closely with representatives from all domains across the firm, and own meaningful slices end-to-end — from architectural choices through delivery to production support. Success in this role means measurably improving the resilience, capability or velocity of the platforms Optiver's traders rely on every day. Responsibilities: Design, build and operate components of Critical Engineering's APAC platform, taking ownership of the delivery of meaningful, cross-team projects. Write production-grade C++ for the real-time, low-latency and high-throughput services that enable Optiver's trading at scale. Set technical direction within your area of ownership, and make architectural decisions that hold up under production load. Partner with representatives from all domains across the firm to translate business problems into pragmatic technical solutions. Manage deployments to reduce risk, and provide production support where required. Maintain quality across the team's systems through code review, automated testing and strong observability. Drive continuous improvement, replacing legacy or manual processes with better-engineered systems. Mentor and act as a role model for less experienced engineers, raising the engineering bar across the team. WHO YOU ARE We need our next engineer to be someone with: Strong C++ programming ability — productive in production C++ from day one. Excellent computer-science fundamentals: operating systems, data structures, algorithms and networking. Practical Linux/Unix proficiency. Familiarity with at least one scripting language (e.g. Python). 3+ years building and operating production software systems. The level at which a candidate is hired flexes with demonstrated quality of engineering, rather than years alone. Experience working through the full software development lifecycle: requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment and ongoing operation. A track record of solving technically challenging problems and shipping them to real users. Additional experience we value: Working knowledge of distributed systems patterns, observability tooling and CI/CD pipelines. Experience building real-time, low-latency or high-throughput systems. Familiarity with relational databases or modern data stacks. A solid understanding of the trade lifecycle across a range of financial instrument…