Citadel·Software Engineer

Citadel Software Engineer interview experience

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Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My first Citadel interview felt like it was coming from the dispute team, and the questions matched that mix of practical processing and deeper algorithm thinking.

The first task was straightforward CSV processing, but I ended up taking longer than I expected writing it in C++. The interviewer basically signaled that the same job could be done in far fewer lines if I used Python, which made me feel a bit slow.

Then the focus shifted to range minimum queries. I asked a time-complexity question up front—whether optimizing runtime was actually relevant—and the interviewer seemed surprised that no one had challenged the assumption before. I talked through segment trees, sliding windows, and an approach to RMQ with O(n log n) techniques, and his reaction

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