Hudson River Trading Software Engineer interview experience

The first phone conversations weren’t laid out like a typical “here’s a coding problem and we’ll chat” screen. Instead, I got hit with lots of detailed questions about how C or C++ work under the hood—memory management, virtual memory, and how data and allocations behave in practice. It felt very different from the usual algorithm-only style.

The algorithm portion that did come up was intertwined with systems concepts. I was asked to describe approaches for algorithm-style problems (like variations of “two sum” and finding smallest elements) without actually writing code, which made the