XR Trading Interview Questions
& Process

I applied and got rejected but then got an email saying the hiring manager saw my application and wanted to interview me. The interviewer was awkward and mostly sat in silence. I asked if he had questions. He asked basic Linux questions. Others were listening on Slack, which I wasn't told about. They accidentally leaked their mic, and I found out it was Slack when I asked who was talking. At the end, he said he just wanted to see if I was crazy. This was followed by a take-home technical test.

Don't bother applying if you're a decent developer who values yourself - they'll string you along and waste your time. Terrible company. I did an online coding challenge, then went through 3 rounds where interviewers asked the same questions about my coding test. In the 'final round' with 3 devs, I answered all technical questions and was just chatting to kill time. They mentioned a final interview with management, but then unexpectedly rejected me and offered a NIGHT SHIFT role! What a joke! I interviewed for the Night Shift role, and that person also reviewed my coding test for a fourth time... said there would be more technical interviews (even though past interviewers confirmed my Python skills were good). Complete nonsense and a waste of time, take your skills somewhere else.

Recruiter put me in for a quantitative developer role. Had a phone screen, about 30 minutes, covering background, technical stuff, quant questions, and career goals. Then, within an hour, the recruiter called saying I had to do 2 online tests: a 30-minute Wonderlic and a 90-minute C++ test. I felt I nailed both. They also sent a dynamic programming assignment, which was an Euler project problem. Since I've done many of those, I finished it easily. The next day, I got invited for an in-person interview three days later. The head of IT met me for 15 minutes. The format was great – you meet several leads from different departments, and any of them could hire you, super efficient. After that, I met two people, one a quant developer. They didn't ask many specific questions, and I can't recall much about our discussion other than questions about the programming assignment. I was surprised they didn't dig deeper into its time/space complexity, data structure choices, or why recursion. They seemed quite disinterested, polite but cold. We didn't seem to click. Then I met two more people, one talked, the other silent. No real intro, and similar personalities to the previous pair. One put a programming assignment on the whiteboard but was vague about the requirements and incoherent. He interrupted me constantly. After about 30 minutes, we arrived at a solution. Walking out, I realized that with clear requirements, a laptop, and some space, I could have solved it in under 5 minutes. This experience showed me a lot about the firm – maybe a hostile or confrontational environment where they don't aim for mutual success. It also taught me things to improve on myself. Nothing Quant-related came up in the entire process, even though I applied for a Quant developer role. It's surprising I rated this positively; it was an extreme outlier experience, unlike any other I've had.

The interview process started with a Python take-home challenge that included some statistical modeling. This was followed by a second round interview with a trader/developer. The firm was very slow throughout the entire process, taking about 2-3 weeks to respond at any point, which felt like they didn't value my time. I was ultimately rejected without any explanation. I answered all the technical questions correctly in the second round and felt I had a good conversation with the interviewer about my experiences, but after not hearing back for 2.5 weeks, I received a generic rejection email.