AI Engineer
OptiverAbout the Role
Join Optiver's Applied AI and Platform Engineering team as an AI Engineer, where you'll design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems that automate workflows, augment decision-making, and accelerate engineering across the firm. You'll own the full lifecycle—from identifying opportunities and translating ambiguous business problems into scalable AI solutions to deploying, operating, and continuously improving systems in production. You'll combine strong software engineering with pragmatic AI expertise to build reliable AI products that deliver measurable business impact.
In this role, you will design and deploy AI systems including agent platforms, AI assistants, and evaluation frameworks using Python and modern AI frameworks. You'll evaluate foundation models and AI workflows, define success metrics, build robust evaluation frameworks, and design resilient, distributed AI systems with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance, and security. You'll rapidly prototype and experiment with emerging models, partner with trading and research teams, and operate production AI systems while continuously improving quality and reliability.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including extensive production experience developing applications in Python
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including software architecture, object-oriented design, design patterns, distributed systems, testing, and building scalable, resilient applications
- Experience designing, deploying, and operating production LLM applications, with practical knowledge of model evaluation, prompt engineering, tool calling, context management, agent orchestration, and common failure modes
- Experience defining evaluation frameworks and using quantitative metrics to guide model selection, prompt iteration, and production readiness
- Experience integrating AI systems with external tools, APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and modern AI application frameworks
- Strong engineering judgment, with the ability to determine when AI is the right solution—and when traditional software or deterministic automation is more appropriate
- Experience building highly reliable production systems where correctness, resiliency, observability, and operational excellence are essential
- Strong product mindset, with the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into practical technical solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience partnering directly with cross-functional teams and end users to refine requirements, challenge assumptions, and deliver scalable solutions
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
What You'll Get
- $200k base salary
- The opportunity to work alongside world-class engineers and researchers from more than 40 countries
- A 401(k) match of up to 50%
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, mental health, disability, and life insurance
- 25 days of paid vacation, plus market holidays
- Extensive office perks, including breakfast, lunch, snacks, social events, clubs, sports leagues, and more