Interviewing for a technical job in financial services used to involve hours of practicing LeetCode questions but, in a post-AI world, how necessary is it to actually code in interviews? It depends on where you want to work.
For most corporate roles, AI has been banned in the interview process in recent years, but that has been changing. HackerRank has rolled out Chakra, an agentic AI interviewing system, which had reportedly conducted over 500,000 interviews during testing across companies like Capgemini and Snowflake as of October. This system permits the applicant to use AI as part of coding processes, and assesses how they interact with the tools. HackerRank CEO Vivek Ravisankar told TechCrunch that “anybody can produce an artifact” but that interviews now need to assess why and how an applicant builds that artifact.
Chakra is not widespread in finance yet; Ravisankar told us that financial services firms are in the “early stages” of adopting Chakra, but “adoption is very strong in adding an AI assistant for their candidates and evaluating AI fluency.”
For many hedge funds and prop trading firms, where graduates can earn up to $1m, AI still seems to be taboo. One student currently interviewing for quant roles across hedge funds and trading firms told us that interviews progress to on-sites much faster than they did in the past and that he has “never been allowed to use AI” during them “to prevent cheating.”
Jane Street seems to be the exception: it released a blog post this month describing how it “started trialling some new kinds of interviews in our onsites for campus candidates” in this summer’s recruitment cycle for which LLMs were permitted. The focus in these interviews is less on coding and more on “software design, on verifying the quality, structure, and intention of code.” Usage of LLMs is also assessed.
Other than this new round, which was not used for each on-site, Jane Street said its interviews “haven’t changed.” The focus is still on talking through a problem with an interviewer, and AI is usually not permitted. When we analyzed the type of LeetCode questions financial services firms ask, we found that electronic trading firms asked a much higher proportion of easy questions than hedge funds and even banks.
Other firms may not be too far behind. Citadel Securities chief people officer Alex DiLeonardo told Fortune in August that judgement when using AI tools is a quality that employers “will increasingly look for as they recruit new talent.” At a Semafor conference in April, DiLeonardo said that the firm looks at “AI skill” during campus hiring and looks at the “intrinsic capabilities that make [candidates] well suited to leverage AI tools.” He did not say whether Citadel Securities had changed its interview process, however.
One way that other trading firms assess candidates are take-home assignments which are more complex than standard coding problems. The student said these are more common, and that the approach to AI is more relaxed compared to on-sites. “If you can explain the code and take ownership,” you can do well in these projects. If you can’t, you won’t. It’s also increasingly common for trading firms to develop interactive games as part of the interview process to test candidates’ decision making under pressure. The student said that, if you know someone who has played these games and can describe how they work, it’s easy to reverse-engineer them using AI as part of your prep; some people have already done this and released their games for free online, like ex-commodities trading intern Deacon Larson, who released Crude Desk last month.
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