Citadel Securities Quantitative Trader interview experience

After that, I scheduled a phone interview where a trader talked through my background and asked why I wanted to trade. The technical portion included a brainteaser I genuinely had no idea how to answer, and that combination left me feeling very unprepared for the kind of lateral difficulty they went for.

Even though the phone stage was straightforward in format—background first, then questions—the brainteaser was the thing that threw me off completely. I didn’t get invited to the next step, and the rejection felt less like my explanations were “almost there” and more like I was missing an