How to get a $20k a month trading firm internship
Getting an internship in an electronic trading firm isn't easy. Firms like Jane Street, Hudson River Trading and Susquehanna are known both for having a high bar for talent, and for paying their interns thousands of dollars per week. But what do these firms do? Who are they looking for? And how do you get in on the action?
What types of trading firms are there?
The ecosystem of electronic trading firms is diverse. There are many labels used to describe firms in the space, and most firms fit under multiple banners.
Many firms are classed as proprietary trading (prop trading) firms, which means they make trades with their own money rather than on behalf of investors like a hedge fund.
A lot of these firms first started as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, who made their name by trading based on price inefficiencies that other firms were too slow to capitalize on. They did this by having cutting edge, low-latency technology to execute trades quickly. Because of this, they've historically preferred people with deep technical expertise who can write code that enables very fast trades.
However, most of the larger firms, including Citadel Securities and IMC Trading, also (and sometimes only) engage in electronic market making. A firm will do this by holding large quantities of an asset like US equities or crypto, and will facilitate trades between other market participants. They'll quote sellers one price, buyers another, and pocket the difference.
Increasingly, firms are expanding into medium-frequency trading (MFT) strategies, which means that they'll hold their position (how much of an asset they own) for hours or days at a time. The likes of Jane Street, Hudson River Trading and and Tower Research are doing this at the moment.
Trading firms are also growing their machine learning teams, with some firms like XTX Markets owning thousands of GPUs to power their trades. They're also looking into more unorthodox assets and strategies; Susquehanna, for example, is building out a quantitative sports betting team.
What qualifications do you need for an electronic trading internship?
Unsurprisingly, if you want an internship in algorithmic trading, you'll most likely need to be studying some sort of STEM degree.
Jane Street says in job listings that it's not looking for a specific background and welcomes all kinds of applicants. When we looked at who it actually brought in as interns this year, there were two subjects that were overwhelmingly popular: mathematics and computer science. Trading interns were more likely to study math while engineering interns studied computer science, but many interns on either side were studying both.
Firms like Citadel Securities profess that they are school agnostic, which means you shouldn't write yourself off if you're at a non-target school, but most firms tend to strongly prefer students from top schools on average. MIT, for example, is the most popular school for alumni at both Citadel Securities and Jane Street.
Historically, younger trading firms have preferred people at undergraduate level for internships and eventual graduate roles, believing that postgraduates can be more set in their ways. PhDs can be advantageous, however when working on highly specialized technologies like FPGAs or machine learning. There are internships available to PhDs specifically, but they tend be for quant and machine learning roles rather than engineering ones.
What programming languages do you need for a trading firm internship?
In algorithmic trading, you'll be working with both high-level languages and low-level ones. In most cases, that means working with Python and C++.
Python is beloved in the quant trading space because it's accessible and has a variety of libraries that make it customizable to your needs. For example, you can use NumPy to do more statistical analysis or use PyTorch for machine learning.
C++, meanwhile, has a reputation for being the fastest programming language, but the speed isn't obtained easily. The language can be quite difficult to work with, especially at the latencies required in HFT. It requires implementing some difficult specialist techniques, which we've examined here. This is much more important for engineering and quant development roles than for quant research ones.
Sometimes, firms use alternative languages. Jane Street is famous for being one of the few firms to use OCAML, while some smaller firms are beginning to experiment with Rust. At Citadel Securities, engineers have early access to C++26, the next iteration of C++. Other languages you might encounter are Verilog if you're working with FPGAs, Q if you're working with KDB databases, or CUDA/Mojo if you're working with GPUs.
What is the interview process for a trading firm internship?
Maxine Armstrong, a 2025 engineering intern at Dutch HFT firm Optiver posted advice on LinkedIn for prospective interns on how to approach interviews in the sector. She said there are interview stages you'll usually experience when applying to electronic trading firms.
- An initial online assessment
- A technical screening interview
- A DSA (data-structures and algorithms) assessment.
- A system design interview
- A behavioural interview.
There's a ramping difficulty scale for these interviews. The online assessment can be done on your schedule; Armstrong said you should make sure you're "well-rested, hydrated, and have enough energy to spend a few hours on" it.
The screening calls are more structured, but feature simple algorithmic problems. Armstrong said you should focus on "understanding the problem, explaining your process, and writing clear and readable code."
The DSA assessment is a similar process, but features more difficult problems. Armstrong encourages that you brush up on your LeetCode in preparation.
There's a big step-up if you get to the systems design interview. Armstrong said it is a "totally different ball game to programming interviews, and requires a bit of a paradigm shift."
Armstrong said that, to pass this interview, you should "keep your thinking on the business needs that you're trying to solve," and "justify trade-offs" when you make them.
The final interview is a behavioural test. Armstrong said you should thoroughly research and understand the company before doing this interview, and "make sure to consider your answers to those stereotypical behavioural questions." Reflection and honesty are key.
What are the interview questions for a trading firm internship
It's difficult to see the questions for specific HFT firms online due to confidentiality agreements signed by some interviewees as part of the interview process. On LeetCode, there are multiple questions that Jane Street is thought to ask variations of. These include:
2085. Count Common Words With One Occurrence
Given that there are two strings, each containing a list of words, find and return which words appear only once across both strings.
(72.7% completion rate)
874. Walking Robot Simulation
You must track how far a robot moves on an infinite 2d grid, following a chain of commands to either move forward or turn in either direction.
(58.4% completion rate)
42. Trapping Rain Water
You are given an elevation map on a graph. You must calculate how much water could be stored in the recepticles created by the graph. (this one is also a favourite of Goldman Sachs)
(65.8% completion rate)
Tasks in HFT interviews are often custom-made, so don't expect to find a LeetCode problem verbatim. You can find an example of a custom HFT coding problem here.
For examples of system design interview questions, you can turn to C++ interview preparation site WallSteetCPP. For interviews in HFT, you could expect to be asked to:
- Design a high-performance backtesting system for HFT strategies.
- Design a real-time market data processing system.
- Design a distributed cache for sharing market data across trading applications.
Behavioural and non-technical interview questions will vary from firm to firm. We've collected a few questions that some of the top firms that engineering interns have been asked, according to Glassdoor:
- Describe the personal projects listed in your resume. (Jane Street)
- How would you attempt to solve issues with software bugs? (Hudson River Trading)
- What is your major, and why did you get into it? What was your favourite course? (Susquehanna)
- What is one technical hobby you have? (Susquehanna)
- What is your biggest achievement? (Citadel Securities)
- What is your biggest flaw? (Citadel Securities)
- What's the difference between Python and C++? (Optiver)
- Why do you want to work at Optiver? (Optiver)
As for the quant brainteasers, you can find a broader list of questions here, but some of our favourites include:
- There are 100 prisoners and a room with a lightbulb. Prisoners are called in at random to turn the bulb on or off. Upon exiting, the room, they must guess whether they are the last of the 100 to enter the room. If they are correct, they go free, if not, everyone fails. Prisoners may communicate beforehand, but once the game begins, they are separated and have no idea who has or hasn't entered the room yet. What strategy would ensure the prisoners would be successfully released? (Citadel Securities)
- What is the probability that two people in a room full of 15 share the same birthday? (Jump Trading)
- What are the odds that I have a relative who is a professional baseball player? (Jane Street, famously a question asked to Sam Bankman-Fried)
How much do trading firm internships pay?
Pay can vary wildly from firm to firm, but you can comfortably expect to be paid multiple thousands of dollars per week in the US.
At Jane Street, engineering interns earn $5.8k per week in addition to a potential sign-on bonus and other benefits. Hudson River Trading offers the same weekly pay for its sophomore internship, in which you rotate through its quant and engineering divisions.
Not all internships are quite so well-paid but most are still enticing. IMC Trading, for example, pays engineering interns $3.4k in Chicago
For quants, pay tends to be higher. Jane Street offers trading staff the same base salary but signing bonuses reported on levels.fyi tend to be much higher. IMC offers its quant trading interns in Chicago a higher salary than engineers: $4.85k per week.
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