Design low-latency trading infrastructure
Company: Optiver
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
## System design: low-latency trading system with colocated box
You are designing infrastructure for an electronic trading system.
- You have a **server/locker box colocated next to the exchange** (very low latency to the exchange).
- Your **traders work from an office in another city** (higher latency, across a WAN).
### Prompt
Design the end-to-end infrastructure needed to:
- receive market data,
- generate trading decisions,
- manage risk,
- send orders to the exchange,
- monitor and control the system.
Discuss:
- what runs in the colocated box vs the office,
- networking choices (wires/links, redundancy, bandwidth vs latency trade-offs),
- TCP/IP vs UDP considerations, packet loss/ordering, jitter,
- servers, time sync, observability, and operational safety.
Assume extreme sensitivity to latency and correctness.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of low-latency trading system architecture, networking and protocol trade-offs (TCP/IP vs UDP), time synchronization, fault tolerance, observability, and operational safety when splitting functionality between a colocated box and remote offices, within the System Design domain.