I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver in Feb 2023
Interview
They are giving homework before the actual interview on the hackerrank platform. It consists of several easy theoretical questions and three programming problems. The first two are also easy, but the last one took several hours to solve. The idea is quite obvious (Deijkstra algorithm, distances between given vertex and all the others), but there are a lot of details regarding input/output and error handling, so doing it all accurately takes quite a lot of time. Based on my solution they invited me for a behavioral interview with their HR. It was a typical conversation about experience, motivation, previous job, etc. A week or two later I got an email saying I didn't pass this interview. No specific feedback, just advice to "develop new skills and gain experience so that you can be successful in the interview process in the future". I asked them what specific skills/experience should I develop, but they didn't respond. The whole process ended up being a waste of my time. I wouldn't have complained if my "cultural misfit" had been revealed before I spent a lot of my time on their test. In general, I do not advise you to do these test assignments, especially if they require a significant amount of your time if this is the first stage of communication with the company. There is a chance that HR will simply not like you and your time will be wasted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Programming homework: problem on the Daiksta algorithm, the distance between a given pair of vertices. Additional condition: we are asked to return an error if there are several shortest distances. Behavioral Interview: a typical conversation about experience, motivation, previous job, etc.
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Optiver (Amsterdam) in Aug 2025
Interview
First received a link to a Hackerrank style online coding interview. There was only one question. It was not too hard but one needs to think carefully about optimal solution. Otherwise, timeout will be encountered. 10 days after completing coding part, behavioral interview is done with a HR style guy. Got rejected after the behavioral interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding question was about a scenario where hash tables and queues should be used.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Optiver in Feb 2025
Interview
Talked to an engineer in Austin for the expansion of their New York office and equities trading. He took most of the time asking for work history and technical questions.
He left about 10 minutes at the end for a fairly simple coding question but that's where the trouble started. The platform is extremely broken:
- There's a checkbox to turn off autocomplete but it didn't work, the editor kept overwriting what I typed.
- Compiler errors and warnings weren't highlighted in either the editor or the output window so I had to spend a lot of time squinting at line wrapped black+white verbose g++ output to find the line number for each error.
- Segfaults didn't show what line they happened on so I had to spend way too much time bisecting with printf's to find the problem.
- Printf also doesn't work because the environment doesn't have flush on newline enabled so even the bisection was harder than it needed to be.
10 minutes wasn't enough to deal with all these editor bugs so I failed. I sent them an email with videos documenting all this in the test environment but they ghosted me.
I don't feel like it was a fair assessment of my abilities whatsoever and frankly they wasted my time.
Optiver has a reputation for blacklisting candidates who don't do well so I would recommend not talking to them as long as they're using a shared coding web interface.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a queue in C++ in their horribly broken interface.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver
Interview
Highly Negative Experience, seriously quite negative. I applied online, they did resume screening. Then sent an Hackerrank OA having medium questions. Being a good programmer I cleared it. After that they scheduled a small 20 min HR interview and in that it was just my past roles etc discussion and what they are doing. After 3-4 days of that round, I received a rejection mail based on my profile. If they wanted to reject based on it, they should have done it before the whole process to save my time and efforts too. If I would have failed in technical interview I would have happily accepted and learnt from it, but rejecting based on profile after taking coding tests and efforts of candidate is just unprofessional.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
In Hackerrank OA, first question was on KMP algorithm, second was on regression