Optiver Shifts Engineering Focus From Latency to AI
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- Optiver turned 40 in March 2026 and now has ~2,200 employees — including ~950 engineers and ~1,000 traders and researchers across 11 offices — executing 10M+ trades daily across 100 exchanges with €4.5B ($5.1B) in 2025 trading income.
- Optiver now invests substantially more in building better information models than in lowering latencies, per CTO Alex Itkin, because ultra-low latency is no longer a competitive moat — competitors have already squeezed equivalent performance out of their systems.
- Optiver manufactures its own hardware — custom FPGAs, custom chips, and an AMD partnership — and operates sub-nanosecond trading systems connected by dedicated fiber, microwave, and shortwave links between co-located data centers.
- Optiver has no external customers — the business itself is the customer — meaning no external deadlines or product launch pressures, but personal motivation to improve is highly valued across the ~950-person engineering organization.
- The Knight Capital bug that triggered $440M in losses in a high-frequency trading system is cited as a cautionary tale shaping the cautious-yet-fast engineering culture at prop shops like Optiver.
- Alex Itkin frames trading's evolution as four eras — pre-electronic (pre-1990s), first wave of electronification, automated trading (late 1990s–~2015), and quantitative trading (~2015–present) — with the number of serious players shrinking because research clusters now require hundreds of millions in investment.
Why it matters: For software engineers, Optiver represents a lucrative, full-stack alternative to Big Tech — compensation at or above top-of-market rates, no external customers, and a culture where a single bug can cost hundreds of millions (as Knight Capital's $440M loss showed). The shift from latency-chasing to model-building also opens prop shops to ML and AI talent that previously overlooked the sector.
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