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.
Since its establishment in 2012, our Shanghai office is a rapidly growing participant in the Chinese markets, trading exchange-listed futures, options and equities in China mainland. Our vision is to become the trusted partner in the development of Chinese financial markets. With the culture of a start-up but the backing of a 35+ year-old trading firm, the Optiver Shanghai office is truly unique. Everyone who joins us will help shape the future of our company and its global impact. Get ready: we are only just beginning.
ABOUT THE TEAM
Optiver is standing up a new AI Engineering team in Shanghai to own model strategy for the firm globally: which models we run, where they run, what they cost, and the proof that every model swap is safe. The team builds and operates a diversified model substrate spanning frontier APIs (Anthropic via Bedrock, Vertex, and first-party) and open-weight models (GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen/Kimi) hosted on third-party cloud and on-prem, alongside the evaluation machinery that makes model selection and routing decisions defensible. You'll grow the team from its first engineers to 10–15 people, organised into two co-located, interchangeable functions: model serving and evaluation. You'll set the team's ceiling.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build the team from 2–3 engineers to 10–15 across two pods (model substrate and evaluation), setting the hiring bar, running the interview slate with Shanghai recruitment, and deciding the team's shape as it scales.
- Own the diversified model substrate: onboard and operate open-weight models on third-party cloud and on-prem inference, and keep the full provider matrix live (Anthropic via Bedrock/Vertex/first-party; GLM, DeepSeek, and Kimi via Alicloud; self-hosted open weights).
- Reduce model supply risk from export restrictions by making the substrate a credible hedge, with regionally-accessible options proven equivalent for the tasks that matter.
- Benchmark models per business function and give users a clear answer to "which model for this task," including guidance around model upgrades.
- Build the evaluation machinery that makes swaps provable: shared graders, calibrated judges, a harvest-and-curate loop for eval data, and a certification gate that replays each agent's suite against a candidate model (passes auto-upgrade, regressions get pinned).
- Own model routing and inference cost optimisation, closing the loop from spend visibility (which this office already holds) to routing decisions proven safe by evals.
- Work across AI Risk, Procurement, Developer Experience, and China office leadership, and partner with the global AI Engineering leads on substrate buildout from day one.
WE'RE LOOKING FOR CANDIDATES:
- With deep production experience serving and tuning large models: inference optimisation, GPU capacity planning, and hosting open-weight models (GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen, or similar) on cloud and on-prem.
- Who have built or run model evaluation systems at scale: benchmark design, LLM-as-judge calibration, and regression gating for model upgrades.
- Who have grown an engineering team from a handful of people to 10 or more, including setting and holding the hiring bar.
- Who reason about models as cost/capability trade-offs and can defend a routing decision with eval data rather than intuition.
- With fluent Mandarin and English, comfortable operating with senior stakeholders across US, EU, and APAC time zones.
- Senior enough to be the first hire and set the bar: this person owns a live deliverable (the substrate buildout) from day one.
WHAT YOU'LL GET
- A performance-based bonus structure unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool, fostering a truly collaborative environment.
- The chance to work alongside diverse and intelligent peers in a rewarding environment.
- Training, mentorship and personal development opportunities.
- Daily breakfast, lunch and snacks.
- Gym membership, sports and leisure activities, plus weekly in-house chair massages.
- Regular social events, clubs and Friday afternoon drinks.
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