Senior Network Engineering Lead (APAC)

WHO WE ARE

Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established in 1986, today we are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world, united in our commitment to improve the market through competitive pricing, execution and risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world in various financial instruments we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets. We provide liquidity to financial markets using our own capital, at our own risk, trading a wide range of products: listed derivatives, cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign currencies.

Optiver’s Sydney office is one of the primary players within Asian markets, trading a range of products. Established in 1996, we're an active participant on the Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan exchanges, and act as Optiver’s APAC head office.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

We are looking for a senior Network Engineering lead to own, evolve & scale the network infrastructure that underpins our trading business. This is a senior, highly technical leadership role at the intersection of networking, infrastructure, trading and business strategy. You will be responsible for the performance, resilience and direction of a latency-sensitive global network, while building and developing a high-performing engineering team around it. The role requires someone who can operate comfortably at multiple levels: going deep on technical architecture when needed, setting direction for senior engineers, making thoughtful risk/reward trade-offs, and partnering effectively with trading and technology leadership. You will act as a key liaison between trading, technology and network engineering; translating business requirements into infrastructure strategy and ensuring the network evolves in step with the firm's needs. As part of the Infrastructure leadership group, you will also help shape our broader infrastructure strategy, engineering standards and culture. Working with teams globally, you will drive convergence of architectures, tooling and operating practices where it improves performance, resilience and simplicity, while recognising where market or business requirements justify deliberate differences. This is not a generalist management role. Technical credibility is essential. You should be equally comfortable discussing detailed network architecture and system behaviour with engineers, prioritisation and opportunity cost with trading and engineering teams, and investment, risk and outcomes with senior leadership. The network is a critical component of our trading platform, and this role will be instrumental in enabling the success of our trading strategies and maintaining our competitive edge.

• Lead, develop and grow a team of highly specialised network engineers, setting a high technical bar while creating an environment of autonomy, ownership and continuous development.

• Own the technical strategy and evolution of our global network infrastructure across data centre, WAN and colocation environments.

• Establish clear architecture standards and design principles, driving convergence and reuse across regions while allowing purposeful divergence where latency, market structure or business requirements demand it.

• Partner with trading and technology teams to understand business priorities and translate them into network strategy, investment decisions and roadmap priorities.

• Make informed trade-offs between latency, resilience, complexity, operational risk, engineering effort and business opportunity.

• Drive major network initiatives from problem definition through architecture, implementation and measurable business outcome.

• Own capacity planning, connectivity strategy and the continued evolution of network performance and resilience across our globally distributed environment.

• Define and execute our approach to network infrastructure-as-code, automated provisioning and CI/CD-driven deployments.

• Drive automation, including appropriate use of AI-assisted tooling, to reduce operational toil, improve engineering effectiveness and accelerate incident detection and response.

• Ensure the network is observable, resilient and operationally well understood, and provide technical leadership during complex incidents and high-impact market events.

• Challenge existing architectures and assumptions, identifying opportunities to simplify the environment, improve performance and reduce risk.

• Collaborate with Infrastructure and software engineering teams to improve common tooling, observability, deployment practices and operational standards.

• Build strong relationships with exchanges, carriers, colocation providers, vendors and other external partners.

• Contribute to Infrastructure leadership, helping shape department-wide strategy, technical standards and engineering culture.

WHO YOU ARE

• An experienced technical leader with a track record of leading, developing or technically guiding high-performing network engineering teams.

• Deeply experienced in designing and evolving large-scale, low-latency networks across global data centre and colocation environments.

• Strong in network architecture and design principles, including scalability, resilience, redundancy, performance optimisation and operational simplicity.

• Technically credible and comfortable remaining close to complex production systems, architecture decisions and difficult operational problems.

• Able to operate effectively across a global engineering organisation, influence beyond your immediate team and drive convergence without standardising for its own sake.

• Experienced in establishing technical standards and engineering practices that improve consistency, maintainability and organisational effectiveness.

• Strong in infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, declarative systems and network automation.

• Comfortable operating in complex, multi-vendor environments with strong hands-on operational experience.

• Interested in applying automation, AI and emerging technologies where they can materially improve infrastructure operations and engineering effectiveness.

• Commercially minded and able to connect infrastructure decisions to trading outcomes, opportunity cost and risk.

• Able to build trusted relationships with trading, technology and senior business stakeholders and navigate competing priorities constructively.

• A strong communicator who can make complex technical issues clear to audiences with very different levels of technical depth.

You are likely someone who has spent a significant part of your career close to complex production systems rather than moving entirely away from technology as your leadership responsibilities grew.

You remain technically curious and enjoy understanding how systems really behave.

At the same time, you recognise that at this level your impact comes not only from the decisions you make yourself, but from the quality of the team you build, the decisions you enable others to make, and your ability to create alignment and drive outcomes across a global organisation.

WHAT YOU'LL GET

You’ll join a culture of collaboration and excellence, where you’ll be surrounded by curious thinkers and creative problem solvers. Driven by a passion for continuous improvement, you’ll thrive in a supportive, high-performing environment alongside talented colleagues, working collectively to tackle some of the most complex problems in the financial markets.

In return for your expertise, you will be offered a competitive salary package as well as access to a range of Optiver perks, including:

• The chance to work alongside best-in-class professionals
• Competitive remuneration and additional leave entitlements
• Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities
• Gym membership plus weekly in-house chair massages
• Daily breakfast, lunch and an in-house barista
• Regular social events including a company trip every two years

Optiver is committed to diversity and inclusion, and it is hardwired through every stage of our hiring process. We encourage applications from candidates from any and all backgrounds, and we welcome requests for reasonable adjustments during the process to ensure that you can best demonstrate your abilities.

Questions? Get in touch with the recruitment team at careers@optiver.com.au.Optiver takes the protection of your personal information seriously and is committed to keeping your personal information safe and confidential. For full details about how Optiver uses your personal information in our recruitment process, please see our Privacy Policy.

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From Optiver's posting. See the original