Level of CS required for quant hedge fund

I am currently a high school junior looking to study mathematics at a (hopefully top) university in the UK or the US.

I want to work at a quantitative hedge fund company like Citadel, and I was wondering how much CS I would need. Is it enough just to know how to programme with languages like Python and C++, or do I need to actually understand the CS aspects like the theory, proofs, computer architecture, etc?

More specifically, Cambridge only offers two separate CS and maths courses, but Oxford has a course called "Computer science and mathematics". Would you recommend the Oxford course?

As a side note, in your opinion, what is the future outlook for quantitative hedge fund jobs?

2 Comments
 

Multiple types of quants at those firms: trader, strategist, developer, researcher. Devs need the most CS; traders need the least. I can't imagine a non-dev role really needing more than to be able to do intermediate data analysis, though 'researcher' is a broad term and can apply to ML. For traders/strategists, I would argue that the math is more important as long as you're able to show that you've been applying the classroom concepts in projects/internships that require you to apply it on real data via code-but the actual coding part of that work isn't particularly advanced. Python and C++ are definitely good enough-I'd lean towards Python just because it is more common in non-latency sensitive work (read: the kind of work that non-devs are doing).

 

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