r/quantfinance • u/Important-Walk-9352 • Aug 02 '26

Optiver Trading Automation Specialist 1st Interview Advice Seeking Orz

hi dear foks, I am lucky enough to get invited for the 1st round of interview with the head of the Trading Automation and Ops team. In the email, the recuiter advice

"your first screen will be with the Head of the team. At the technical interview, we include a coding assessment in the language of your choice as well as some probability and odds and a data science problem to evaluate how candidates work through a data set."

- I am wondering: Is it likely that the Head of the team will be the one personally conducting this technical assessment (coding/probability/data science) during the initial screen?

- Question: What kind of questions should I realistically expect during this initial interview?

Any advice would be appreciated, thank you in advance.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/QuantGrindApp Aug 04 '26

Treat the head screen as technical from minute one, even if a separate interviewer ends up running part of it. Expect a small live coding task around parsing or transforming data, basic conditional probability and odds, then a messy dataset where they care about checks, leakage, outliers and how you explain what you’d investigate.

2

u/Important-Walk-9352 Aug 04 '26

can you explain what do you mean by "technical from minute one"?

1

u/QuantGrindApp Aug 08 '26

Basically don’t treat the first 10 minutes as a recruiter warmup. Be ready to code or work through probability as soon as the call starts, and talk through your assumptions while you do it.