Software engineering at a proprietary trading company: Optiver

AI summary

This article explores the specialized software engineering practices within proprietary trading firms, focusing on the high-performance requirements and lack of external customers. It highlights how firms like Optiver customize industry-standard technologies, such as Postgres and GitHub Actions, to achieve nanosecond-level precision and internal system observability.

Key points

• Trading firms often treat their internal business as the primary product, eliminating traditional external customer pressures.
• Bespoke observability layers are sometimes required when standard CI platforms lack necessary system-level metrics.
• Extreme performance requirements can necessitate upstream contributions to open-source software, such as adding nanosecond precision to Postgres.
• Internal messaging mechanisms can be built upon database write-ahead logs to minimize latency compared to general-purpose message brokers.