Optiver, FPGA Internship

As Optiver’s FPGA Engineer Intern, you’ll own a project connected to our live trading systems, experiencing tight feedback loops and shipping your code to production alongside our Engineers and Traders. You’ll work side-by-side with your mentor to build latency-critical applications, parallel systems and networking interfaces, giving you a clear view of how low-level engineering decisions connect to trading outcomes. You’ll tackle real issues that will test your critical thinking and problem-solving acumen, and each day will bring new challenges that require fresh perspectives. It’s an opportunity to accelerate your knowledge while contributing to systems that operate in live markets.

Examples of potential projects that you could be working on:

• Supporting new networking protocols – think 25G and 100G interfaces
• Developing FPGA applications in close collaboration with our Traders to improve how strategies behave in live markets – where did that nanosecond go?
• Improving the resource usage of our current systems – why use 8 bits when 3 will do?
• Make your mark on our future trading systems by trailblazing new domain areas – from high-precision timestamping to new proprietary inter-system communication protocols

• Student working toward a Master's degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Computer Engineering or similar, with the ability to work full-time upon graduation in 2028
• Someone with strong engineering instincts and academic experience in digital design with FPGAs or ASICs
• Experienced in writing hardware in VHDL, Verilog or SystemVerilog
• Passionate for clean code, simple well-architected systems and continuous improvement, with a desire to understand how the systems you build fit into our trading activities
• Able to collaborate with developers, traders and business operations