Optiver sends online assessments early in its software-engineering hiring process. Each assessment can vary by role, office, and season. One recent graduate software candidate received a 75-minute coding task, a 20-minute programming and systems test, and short neuro-assessment games. A separate recent software candidate received a two-question coding screen. Use your invitation to confirm the structure.

When to Expect the OA for Your Role

Optiver typically gives the assessment after application review and before the first behavioural interview. Current Optiver European recruitment guidelines advise candidates with competing deadlines to complete all online assessments as early as possible and discuss their application timeline with the recruiter during the first behavioural interview. Internship and graduate assessments may combine coding, fundamentals, and games. Experienced and specialist roles may use a different technical assessment. Current Optiver European recruitment guidelines state that once you begin an assessment, you cannot reset it or retake it within an 8-month window.

Does Your Online Assessment Matter?

Optiver uses the OA as an early screening step and does not have a universal cutoff. Optiver may evaluate correctness, data-structure choices, time-complexity reasoning, communication, and knowledge of computer architecture, networking, concurrency, and memory management. Candidates receive little or no feedback early in the process, so use every available test case and reread the input constraints before submitting your solution. When choosing between simple and optimized structures, explain your performance assumptions.

Compiled List of Optiver OA Question Types

These problems cover date arithmetic, order matching, queues, trees, scheduling, rankings, and stateful data structures.

1. Number of Days Between Two Dates — calendar parsing and elapsed-time calculation.
2. Verify Preorder Serialization of a Binary Tree — structural validation from serialized input.
3. Number of Orders in the Backlog — buy/sell matching with heaps.
4. Design Circular Queue — bounded-state updates and wraparound indices.
5. Reconstruct Itinerary — ordered graph traversal.
6. Task Scheduler — frequency reasoning and scheduling constraints.
7. Top K Frequent Elements — ranking with buckets or a heap.
8. Design a Leaderboard — score updates and top-k aggregation.
9. Insert Delete GetRandom O(1) — coordinated array and hash-map state.
10. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II — greedy reasoning over price changes.

Optiver Interview Questions

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Array Reconstruction

coding Medium

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CS Fundamental Questions

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Optiver Graduate Software Engineer 2025 OA Question 2

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Orders Leaderboard

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How to Prepare and Pass the Optiver Online Assessment

Match your practice to each part of the invitation. For coding practice, solve one long problem under a time limit and a pair of problems in a shorter session, then review how you allocated your time. Review arrays, maps, heaps, queues, trees, and validation. For fundamentals practice, review object-oriented language features, memory representation, networking, concurrency, and the complexity of operations. After coding, explain why your approach satisfies latency and memory constraints. Use Lodely to add Optiver-specific technical and behavioral prompts to your practice routine.

Optiver Interview Question Breakdown

Number of Orders in the Backlog

Type: Heap simulation. Prompt: Match compatible buy and sell orders while retaining unmatched orders. The Trick: The two sides use opposite price priorities. What It Tests: Data-structure selection, state updates, and edge cases.

Verify Preorder Serialization of a Binary Tree

Type: Parsing and tree validation. Prompt: Determine whether the tokens in the serialized stream form a valid tree. The Trick: Each token changes the number of available child slots. What It Tests: Invariant discovery and malformed-input handling.

What Comes After the Online Assessment

Candidates who pass may proceed to behavioral and technical interviews, depending on the position. Optiver's engineering interview guidance covers programming, data structures, systems, design decisions, and the ability to handle a constraint. Practice explaining one project and defending a decision while remaining open to alternatives.

Conclusion

Use your invitation to divide preparation among coding, fundamentals, and any game-based components. Then practice explaining the reasoning behind each technical choice. Use Lodely to organize your Optiver follow-up preparation.