Optiver

Kris

My career at Optiver began in September 2006, after I studied Technical Informatics at Hogeschool van Amsterdam. I started as a software engineer in the Front Office Development team. I had no experience with Trading or Finance whatsoever, which is also partially the reason why I decided to join.

Luckily, Optiver helped me along with this quite nicely. Besides helping me gain trading knowledge from my daily activities, Optiver also offered a non-Trader trading course, which gave us a good introduction into the mysterious world of trading.

After about a year, I transferred to a newly created team called the Market Link Development team, to become a Market Link Software Engineer. There, my activities changed from creating client applications to more server-oriented programming.

The Market Link team is in charge of developing server-side software, which functions as a ‘gateway’ between trading client applications and exchange servers. Because a lot of clients connect to our servers, this is work with a high level of responsibility. If anything goes wrong with our market links, a big part of trading is effected.

The fact that my work is so closely related to the core business of the company makes the job very exciting.

The other thing that’s keeping me here is the social aspect of Optiver. Having read something about the financial world, I was expecting to be overwhelmed by suits and guys with fancy briefcases. Well, good luck finding them here!

Instead, I found a bunch of friendly and willing people who’re all working together to make this company better and better. No ties, no suits, it’s actually difficult to distinguish managers or team leads from their team members.

In a couple of years’ time, I’d like to have visited the other offices (in Sydney and Chicago) to get a better feeling of what’s going on there. At some point, I want to have a more leading role within the company – like team lead or manager – and then it’d be good to have some overview of the global activities, as well.