Toxic Culture and blatantly anti- LGBTQ - Trader Optiver Employee Review

worked on a lot of different areas of the trading stack; often close with researchers learned about technical components for data driven trading saw my impact day to day

constant office renovations were a bit distracting, but was told it should be done in 2026

They really do reward excellence. If you are seen as a top achiever, you will be compensated as such. However, the bar is set extremely high. Prepare to put in effort just to find out you are not meeting standards during your performance review. This will also not be communicated to you until your review so you will feel blindsided. You will be pushed to advocate for yourself in your self-reviews but this will not matter to how you are ultimately graded by management if they’ve already made up their mind about you. That said, the perks are nice and teams generally work well together. They claim a “no hierarchy culture” but this has not been the case in my experience. I find that the goalposts for performance get pushed so you can never satisfy them to get that score you’re aiming for even if you apply all of the feedback you are given.

Performance feedback unclear, hierarchical culture, you are assessed in relation to your peers. Management will downplay your accomplishments for reasons unknown