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Optiver SWE Intern HR Screen: Project Deep Dive — Hardest Parts, What You'd Do Differently, and Questions to Ask

OptiverSoftware Engineer · HR Screen
MediumSoftware EngineerHR ScreenBehavioral & Leadership

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This Behavioral & Leadership interview prompt evaluates clarity of communication, ownership, reflective leadership, and the ability to concisely articulate one’s technical contributions during a short project deep-dive for a software engineering internship.

You are on a 20–30 minute recruiter (HR) phone screen for a Software Engineering Intern position at Optiver, a high-frequency trading firm. The call skips the usual "tell me about yourself" opener: after a few logistics questions (your graduation month/year and whether you will need visa sponsorship), the recruiter moves straight into a project deep dive. Everything that follows is driven by one project you choose to talk about — the recruiter's follow-up questions are unscripted and based entirely on what you say.

Work through the deep dive below as you would on the live call.

Constraints & Assumptions

  • The interviewer is a recruiter, not an engineer: they are listening for clarity, ownership, and reflection, not implementation detail. Keep explanations high level and jargon-free.
  • The whole conversation fits in roughly 20–30 minutes, including logistics and your questions at the end — budget about 2–3 minutes for the initial project overview.
  • Follow-ups are reactive: whatever you mention (a technology, a teammate, a setback) is fair game for the next question, so only bring up things you can discuss confidently.
  • Assume you are a current student interviewing for a summer internship; class projects, internships, research, and substantial personal projects are all acceptable material.
  • The logistics questions (graduation timing, sponsorship) are screened honestly and factually; they are not part of the evaluated deep dive.

Clarifying Questions to Ask

  • "Would you like a quick high-level summary first, or should I go into the details of my role right away?"
  • "Is it okay if I use a team project, as long as I focus on my own contribution?"
  • "How technical would you like me to get — should I keep it at the level of what the project did and why, or go deeper into how it worked?"
  • "Roughly how much time do we have for this part, so I can pace myself?"

Part 1

"Give me an example of a project you've worked on — keep it high level. Start with what you did, and I'll ask questions from there."

Part 2

"What were the most difficult parts of this project, and how did you solve them?"

Part 3

"If you went back and did this project again, what decisions would you make differently?"

Part 4

"What questions do you have for us?"

Hints

Hint 1

Choosing the project: Pick the project where **you** made real decisions and hit real obstacles — not your most impressive-sounding one. The follow-ups all probe *your* role, so a project where you were peripheral collapses under the second question.

Hint 2

Structure of the overview: Give a 60–90 second arc: the problem and who it was for, your specific role, what you built (one plain-language sentence per major piece), and the outcome. Deliberately leave one or two interesting threads (a hard bug, a design choice) dangling for the recruiter to pull on.

Hint 3

What counts as a good difficulty: The strongest answers name a difficulty that was *genuinely uncertain at the time* — an ambiguous requirement, a performance wall, an integration that kept breaking — not routine work that just took long. Describe why it was hard *for you then*, not why it sounds hard.

Hint 4

Show the solving process: Walk the recruiter through **how you attacked it**: what you tried first, how you narrowed the cause, who or what you consulted, and what finally worked. The reasoning process is the answer; the fix itself is one sentence.

Hint 5

Real regret, not humble-brag: Name an actual decision you would reverse — a library choice, skipping tests, wrong scope, building before validating — and tie it to a consequence you personally felt later. "I'd start earlier" or "I'd work even harder" signals no reflection at all.

Hint 6

Ask about the internship, not the brochure: Ask things the recruiter can genuinely answer and that show you've thought about *doing the job*: how intern projects are scoped, what mentorship looks like, how interns get feedback, what distinguishes interns who get return offers. Avoid questions a search engine answers (what the company does) and topics premature for an HR screen (compensation, perks).

Follow-up questions

  • "You mentioned your teammate handled that component — so what exactly was *your* contribution there?" (a standard drill-down on Part 1 if ownership is vague)
  • "How did you know your fix in Part 2 actually worked? What would have happened if you hadn't caught it?"
  • "Was there a disagreement on the team about any of these decisions? How was it resolved?"
  • "Of the things you said you'd do differently, have you actually done any of them differently on a project since?"