Optiver Interview Questions — Page 7

Optiver·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver Data Scientist interview with a probability/statistics problem that looks deceptively clean but has a real bite to it once you start working through the gap distribution. The follow-ups were no joke either.

Buses on a route are scheduled every x minutes. Each bus independently arrives on time with probability 1/2, or exactly x/2 minutes late with probability 1/2. You arrive at the stop at a uniformly random time. What is your expected waiting time in terms of x?
How does your answer change if each bus's delay is uniform on [0, x/2] instead of the binary on-time or x/2-late setup?
Generalize: if a bus is late by d minutes with probability p and on time otherwise (with d < x), what is the expected wait as a function of x, p, and d?
Using your gap-based formula, explain intuitively why irregular headways always increase a random rider's expected wait, even when the mean headway stays the same.
How would the expected wait change if buses arrived as a Poisson process with mean headway x instead of the scheduled setup?

“I went straight for the naive E[G]/2 and felt pretty good about it for a moment.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver quant engineer interview with a sequence puzzle that looks deceptively simple. The kind of question where you either see the pattern fast or you're just sitting there doing arithmetic and hoping.

Find the missing term in the sequence: 4, 5, 9, 13, 22, 31, ?, 53. The pattern may involve differences, alternating sums, or a Fibonacci-like recurrence.

“I went straight for differences first, which didn't click immediately.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver quant engineer interview with a probability question that sounds deceptively clean but has a lot of moving parts once you actually try to justify the ranking rigorously.

Two independent random walkers start at given positions on a 10x10 grid. Rank these three events from most to least probable: walker A exits the grid before walker B, walker B exits before walker A, and both walkers occupy the same cell at some point while still inside the grid. Justify your ranking.

“My first instinct was symmetry between events 1 and 2, which felt right but I fumbled explaining when exactly they'd differ based on starting positions.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a software engineering role at Optiver and got hit with a pretty involved system design/coding problem about building a news delivery engine from scratch. The problem had a lot of moving parts and the efficiency constraint at the end is where things got interesting.

Design and implement a news publishing delivery system that supports adding and removing subscriptions, ingesting news items, and running publish cycles that deliver eligible news to subscribers based on their topic interests and per-cycle delivery limits.

“This one took me a while to fully internalize.”

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Optiver·Data Scientist·Recruiter / HR Screen

Jun 2026

Standard HR screen for a Data Scientist role at Optiver. Nothing too surprising, mostly behavioral with a market-making motivation angle thrown in. The questions were predictable but Optiver's context makes some of them feel a bit more loaded than usual.

Walk me through your background and what you've been working on.
Why do you want to work at Optiver, and what draws you to market making specifically?
What makes you a strong fit for this role specifically?
Tell me about a time you had to make a fast, high-stakes decision with incomplete information. What happened?
What are your biggest strengths, and what's a weakness you're actively working on?
Describe a conflict you had with a teammate and how you worked through it.
Tell me about a failure, what you took away from it, and how it changed how you work.
Do you have any questions for us?

“I always fumble the opener a little.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver quant interview, one of those sessions where they hand you a sequence and just stare at you. The math itself wasn't brutal but finding the pattern under pressure with someone watching is a different thing entirely.

You're given the sequence 1, 3/2, 4, 9½, 23, 55½ and asked to identify the rule generating it, verify that rule holds, and then produce the next two terms.

“I stared at the differences first, which was a dead end for a while.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver SWE interview threw a pretty involved OOP simulation problem at me. The kind of question where you think you understand it, then realize halfway through that the edge cases are doing most of the heavy lifting.

Design an object-oriented SatelliteNetwork class that processes a stream of instructions to simulate message propagation across satellites and returns the order and times at which each satellite reports back to Earth. You need to implement methods for adding satellites, establishing connections, and handling a message received event that simulates propagation from multiple simultaneously notified satellites at t=0.
How would you handle disconnected components in the satellite network, and what should MessageReceived return for satellites that are never reached by the propagation?
What happens when multiple senders concurrently try to notify the same satellite? How do you ensure only the earliest arrival sets the notify time while all senders still incur the 10-second forwarding cost?
Should propagation state reset between calls to MessageReceived, or persist across calls? Justify your choice.
Describe the data structures you'd use for this simulation and justify your choices in terms of time and space complexity relative to the number of satellites, relationships, and degree distribution.

“This one wrecked me a little.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver software engineer interview with a meaty simulation problem that looks like a graph BFS question until you actually read it carefully. The propagation timing rules and concurrent notification logic made this way harder than I expected from the setup.

Design and implement a SatelliteNetwork class that simulates timed message propagation across an undirected graph, processing a stream of operations (register satellite, link satellites, broadcast message) and firing callbacks in chronological and lexicographic order as satellites receive messages and report back to Earth.

“The setup sounds like a BFS with some extra steps but the concurrent forwarding rule is where things get messy.”

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Optiver·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Optiver and got hit with a pretty deep sequence inference problem that was more of an algorithms design question than anything I expected. The whole thing felt like a quant-flavored coding challenge dressed up as a data science interview.

Given an integer sequence of up to 50 terms that may follow arithmetic, geometric, alternating, polynomial, digit-level, or interleaved patterns, describe a systematic approach to infer the governing rule and predict the next several terms. Cover the heuristics you'd apply in order, how you'd handle ambiguous or noisy sequences, and how you'd implement this as a scored, ranked program with time complexity analysis.

“This one took me a while to even parse.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Optiver put me through a rapid-fire probability gauntlet for a software engineering role. Six questions back to back, no warmup, just math. Some I handled fine, a couple I fumbled under the time pressure.

When rolling two fair six-sided dice, what is the probability distribution of the sum?
From a standard 52-card deck, if the top 10 cards are discarded face-down without being seen, what is the probability the next card drawn is red?
What is the probability that the sum of two fair dice is 11 or 12?
In a fair-coin gambler's ruin setup with a starting bankroll of 10, a goal of 20, and absorbing barriers at 0 and 20, what is the probability of reaching 20 before going broke?
If a fair six-sided die is rolled N times, what is the expected number of times a specific face appears, and what is the variance of that count?
If four fair six-sided dice are rolled, what is the probability that the product of all four outcomes is odd?

“I knew this one cold.”

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