Quant interview preparation

Questions

100

Traced to a firm

53

Firms

15

Updated

September 2026

Asked at

All firmsOld Mission Capital12Tower Research Capital10Jump Trading7Akuna Capital5Citadel4DED.E. Shaw3Jane Street3ACAQR Capital Management2DRW2Millennium Management2Schonfeld2SCSquarepoint Capital2Susquehanna International Group2Belvedere Trading1Optiver1

Topic

All topicsProbability10Coins, cards and games6Expected value8Statistics11Market making15Estimation and mental maths4Stochastic processes4Regression5Machine learning6Time series6Programming10Options and derivatives8Fit and motivation7

Level

AnyCoreIntermediateHard

Type

AnyBrainteaserTechnicalCaseMarket viewFit

1. 079How would you store key-value pairs, and what are the tradeoffs between the implementations?ProgrammingIntermediatetechnicalJump TradingEngineering · Cambridge · 2019

   Say this

   Hash table for O(1) average lookup with no ordering, balanced tree for O(log n) with ordered iteration and range queries, and a flat sorted array if the data is static and you care about cache behaviour. The choice is driven by whether you need ordering and what your access pattern looks like in memory.

   Then walk it

   1. Hash table: O(1) average, O(n) worst case on collisions, no ordering, and rehashing causes an occasional large latency spike. That spike is a real problem on a trading hot path and it is why people pre-size their maps.
   2. Balanced tree, red-black or B-tree: O(log n) guaranteed, ordered traversal, range queries, and predictable latency. Worse constants and worse cache locality because of pointer chasing.
   3. The tradeoff that matters most in practice is memory layout, not big-O. C++ unordered_map uses separate chaining with nodes scattered across the heap, so every lookup is potentially a cache miss. An open-addressing flat hash map keeps everything in one array and is commonly two to three times faster in real workloads at the same asymptotic complexity.
   4. For a mostly-static table, a sorted array with binary search beats both: contiguous memory, no pointers, and for small n a linear scan beats binary search because it is branch-predictable and prefetchable. Under about 16 to 32 entries, linear wins.
   5. And on disk the answer changes completely: B-trees for read-heavy workloads because of the branching factor against block size, LSM trees for write-heavy because they turn random writes into sequential ones. I would want to know the read-write ratio and whether the working set fits in cache before choosing anything.

   Where candidates lose it

   Answering hash map, O(1), done. The question says tradeoffs, so it is a systems question and the interviewer at a trading firm cares about tail latency and cache behaviour more than asymptotic complexity. Mention rehashing spikes and pointer chasing, and ask what the access pattern is.

   Expect next

   • Why is std::unordered_map often slow in practice?
   • How would you avoid latency spikes from rehashing?
   • What changes if the data lives on disk?

   Reported by candidates at Jump Trading (Engineering, Cambridge, 2019). Source: Wall Street Oasis.

2. 080Can you implement a linked list, and when would you actually use one on a trading system?ProgrammingCorephone / first roundJump TradingProp Trading · Remote · 2022

   Say this

   Yes, a node with a value and a next pointer, plus a head, and the usual care about the empty list and about updating head when you insert or delete at the front. But the honest answer to the second half is: rarely, because pointer chasing destroys cache performance.

   Then walk it

   1. The implementation: struct with value and next, insert at head in O(1), search in O(n), delete given the previous node in O(1). Use a dummy head node and most of the edge cases disappear, which is the trick worth knowing for interviews.
   2. The standard edge cases they will check: empty list, single element, deleting the head, and not leaking the node you unlinked. In C++ that means being explicit about ownership, and in a real codebase it means a unique pointer or an arena.
   3. What a linked list genuinely buys you: O(1) splice of a node from the middle if you already hold a pointer to it, and stable addresses so a pointer stays valid across insertions. That is exactly the requirement in a limit order book, where you need to cancel an arbitrary resting order in constant time, so orders at a price level are typically an intrusive doubly linked list with a hash from order id to node.
   4. What it costs: every traversal is a potential cache miss, and a vector beats a list for iteration by an order of magnitude even when the asymptotics say otherwise.
   5. So the real-world answer is an intrusive list over a pre-allocated node pool, not a textbook list with individual heap allocations. Saying that is the difference between having done the exercise and having written low-latency code.

   Where candidates lose it

   Writing the code correctly and having nothing to say about why you would use one. At a trading firm the interesting half is the memory and cache discussion, and the order book cancel case is the one concrete example where a linked list is genuinely the right structure. Also do not forget the dummy head trick, it removes most of the bugs.

   Expect next

   • Reverse it in place.
   • Detect a cycle in constant space.
   • Why would a vector usually beat a list even when the complexity says otherwise?

   Reported by candidates at Jump Trading (Prop Trading, Remote, 2022). Source: Wall Street Oasis.

Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.