Optiver Interview Questions — Page 9

Optiver·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026

Optiver coding round focused on a flight/cargo optimization problem where you had to modify a broken greedy implementation to actually maximize profit. The follow-ups were quick and they expected you to reason out loud about constraints on the fly.

You're given a broken implementation that buys every available flight regardless of cost. Given a list of flights (departure time, max weight, cost) and cargo items (weight, latest arrival, revenue), modify the algorithm to select which flights to purchase and which cargo to load so that total revenue minus total flight cost is maximized, while respecting weight limits and delivery deadlines.
How would you handle explaining to a user why a specific flight they requested is not available, given that a competitor may have already purchased it?

“The starting code was deliberately unprofitable, which was a bit disorienting at first because I spent a minute just reading it trying to figure out if I was missing something.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Optiver quant engineer interview with a data structures problem that sounds trivial until you're actually sitting there trying to remember how ring buffers work under pressure. The interviewer walked me through it more than I'd like to admit.

Design and implement a circular queue class with enQueue, deQueue, Front, Rear, isEmpty, and isFull operations, all running in constant time.

“I knew what a circular queue was in the abstract but blanked on the fixed-capacity ring buffer framing until the interviewer nudged me toward it.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a software engineer role at Optiver. Felt like a mix of the standard 'sell yourself' stuff and a genuinely tricky judgment-under-pressure question that I wasn't fully ready for.

Give a brief self-introduction tailored to quantitative trading research. Why are you interested in this role, and why Optiver specifically?
Tell me about a time you had to make a high-stakes decision quickly with incomplete information. How did you balance speed versus accuracy, and what estimation or mental-math techniques did you rely on? What would you change if you faced the same situation again?

“Pretty standard opener but I fumbled the quant angle a bit.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026

Optiver SWE interview had me designing a FIFO queue from scratch and then defending every implementation choice under pressure. Pretty deep dive for what I expected to be a standard data structures round.

Design a FIFO queue supporting enqueue, dequeue, peek, and isEmpty. Walk through implementations using a singly linked list, a dynamic array, and a circular buffer, then compare their trade-offs in terms of time complexity, space overhead, cache behavior, and amortized resizing costs. Also cover edge cases like underflow and overflow, and how you'd handle concurrent access.

“This started normal enough and then kept going.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Optiver system design round for a software engineering role. The problem was a full news subscription service, end to end, and they wanted data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, and a scaling discussion all in one shot. Dense problem, not much hand-holding.

Design and implement a topic-based news subscription service. The class needs to support adding/updating subscriptions, removing them, ingesting news items, and a Publish method that delivers news to subscribers with filtering, rate limiting, deduplication, and multi-key ordering. Walk through your data structures, algorithms, complexity, and how you'd scale this to millions of users.

“This is a lot.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Optiver software engineer interview with a pretty involved quant/systems question that blurred the line between coding and strategy design. One question but it had a lot of moving parts and I'm still not sure I handled all of them well.

Given minute-level OHLCV data for a single stock across 180 trading days, design and backtest a mean-reversion strategy. Cover entry and exit rules, risk controls, position sizing, transaction costs, and slippage. Your backtest should output PnL, win rate, average trade return, max drawdown, volatility, Sharpe ratio, and turnover. Then do a hold-out or walk-forward validation and discuss overfitting, using a statistical test like bootstrap or a reality-check procedure to assess whether the results are actually significant.

“This was a lot to unpack in one question.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Optiver Software Engineer interview with a single algorithmic problem that looked manageable on the surface but had a lot of edge cases stacked on top of each other. The problem combined parsing, graph validation, and tree serialization all in one, which made it more of a gauntlet than a typical coding question.

Given a string of parent-child pairs describing a binary tree (e.g. "(A,B) (B,C) (A,D)"), validate the input format and graph structure, then either print the tree's S-expression or the highest-priority error code among: invalid format, duplicate pair, node with more than 2 children, multiple roots, or cycle/multiple parents.

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

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Optiver system design round for a software engineering role. The question was about designing a queue abstraction from scratch and then comparing different internal implementations, which sounds straightforward until they start pushing on trade-offs and thread safety.

Design an object-oriented Queue abstraction with a clean interface, then describe and compare at least two or three different internal implementations (linked list, circular array, two stacks), including trade-offs around time complexity, memory behavior, and when you'd choose each.
How would you extend the queue design to support bounded versus unbounded queues, and thread-safe versus non-thread-safe variants, while keeping the same interface?

“I started with the interface, which was fine.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Optiver software engineer interview with a pretty dense quant-flavored coding problem. The kind of question where you think you understand it and then realize halfway through that the rebalancing logic is trickier than it looks.

You're given an N by T price matrix for multiple assets. Starting with some cash capital, compute daily simple returns, then for each day allocate portfolio weights proportional to positive returns only (zero weight for non-positive). If all returns are negative or zero, hold full cash. Rebalance daily with no transaction costs and fractional shares allowed. Return the mean and standard deviation of the daily log returns over the full period.

“The math description sounds clean on paper but actually implementing it correctly is another thing.”

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Optiver·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Optiver software engineer interview with a pretty gnarly algorithmic problem involving currency arbitrage. The twist with the transaction cost made it more interesting than your typical Bellman-Ford question.

Given a K×K matrix of currency exchange rates where R[i][j] represents how much of currency j you get per unit of currency i, determine if any cycle of exchanges produces a net profit after a 0.01% transaction cost applied once per completed cycle.

“Classic arbitrage detection but the transaction cost modifier threw me for a second.”

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