Quantitative Researcher Intern Interview - Quantitative Research
Anonymous employee in Bengaluru
Interviewed:
July
2025
Date Submitted:
Oct 11, 2026
Outcome
Accepted Offer
Interview Source
College / University / On Campus Recruiting
Length of Process
Less than 1 month
Application
1 on 1 Interview
Group Interview
Skills Test
Interview
The process started with a coding assessment consisting of four medium-level questions: two roughly equivalent to a 1200 Codeforces rating and the other two around 1400. The aim was to solve them as quickly as possible. Candidates were then shortlisted for interviews based on their assessment performance and resumes.
There were two interviews. The first was in person with two full-time quantitative researchers. They began by discussing one of my projects, an option pricing engine, and then moved on to probability puzzles. These were mostly one-step extensions of problems from 50 Challenging Problems in Probability, along with several questions involving expected value and variance that could be solved using one or two basic standard mathematical tricks.
The second interview was online with a full-time quantitative researcher. It started with a few basic, intuition-based questions about options that required no prior background, followed by a series of seven or eight probability puzzles. I solved all but the last without hints. For the final puzzle, I asked for a hint and then completed the solution. After the interviews, I was offered an internship.
There were two interviews. The first was in person with two full-time quantitative researchers. They began by discussing one of my projects, an option pricing engine, and then moved on to probability puzzles. These were mostly one-step extensions of problems from 50 Challenging Problems in Probability, along with several questions involving expected value and variance that could be solved using one or two basic standard mathematical tricks.
The second interview was online with a full-time quantitative researcher. It started with a few basic, intuition-based questions about options that required no prior background, followed by a series of seven or eight probability puzzles. I solved all but the last without hints. For the final puzzle, I asked for a hint and then completed the solution. After the interviews, I was offered an internship.
Interview Questions
In the first interview, the trickiest moment was when, under pressure, I used a gamma integral formula to calculate an expected value, only to realise later that a much simpler approach would have worked. The other questions were fairly straightforward, and the interviewers were very helpful with hints.
In the second interview, I wasn’t expecting the opening questions, which were along the lines of, “What would you do if the market had zero volatility?” and “What would you do if the market had volatility of minus infinity?” Among the probability puzzles, the hardest was about an ant starting at one corner of a cuboid. At each step, it chooses one of the three edges meeting at its current corner with equal probability and moves to the adjacent corner. The question was to find the expected number of steps needed to reach the diagonally opposite corner.
In the second interview, I wasn’t expecting the opening questions, which were along the lines of, “What would you do if the market had zero volatility?” and “What would you do if the market had volatility of minus infinity?” Among the probability puzzles, the hardest was about an ant starting at one corner of a cuboid. At each step, it chooses one of the three edges meeting at its current corner with equal probability and moves to the adjacent corner. The question was to find the expected number of steps needed to reach the diagonally opposite corner.
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