I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Optiver (Sydney)
Interview
Submitted a resume to a role advertised on the Optiver website. Was contacted a few days later by HR. Completed a fairly standard 30 min phone interview which covered my previous work experience, what I was looking for etc.
Was contacted several days later and asked to complete a online SHL (brainbench) programming aptitude test. This was fairly tough (as the questions become harder as you more correct i.e. test was adaptive) but if you practice on some sample tests you should be ok.
Was then contacted a week later and asked to come in for a 90 min technical interview (I had just scrapped through the online test). Since this was a new role, there was no standard steps in place for the interview process(basically they were making up the steps as they went along). The technical test consisted of several questions (some with multiple parts) which was fairly language independent
* Compare hash table vs binary search
* Parse a binary tree structure to return a value
* Analyse a section of code and determine the output and reasons for the code
Most of the questions except the last one were fine.
Was contacted a few days later and asked to come in for a formal technical interview with some staff members and with HR.
The technical interview related to a problem with messaging and some changes that need to be implemented to system consisting of several components. You get 5 mins to look at the problem then you can ask questions. You are then given 30 mins to think about the problem before they ask you to go through the solution. They will ask specific questions to help guide you to a solution. This process was quite enjoyable though maybe I didn't ask the right questions at the start as it took a while to get to the solution. It did seem that the initial details were quite vague in stating what components of the problem you were allowed to change. The given problem though was not related to the role that I would be hired to perform (front office development compared to a back end development problem) - it seemed that they used this problem because they had experience in asking this in the past.
The HR interview goes in depth into your background using behavioral interviewing. Just make sure you have some standard answers prepared.
In total the technical and HR interviews took approx 4 hours.
I was contacted a few days later to say I was unsuccessful. I did ask why and was told that the technical interview was not strong enough. The HR person couldn't specifically state what was the actually issue and was very vague when pushed to answer in more detail.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The last question in the technical test was very odd and the technical workshop problem related to task that was not appropriate to the role in question