Susquehanna (SIG) hires Trader / Quant Researcher, Quant Strategy Developer and Software Engineer. Candidates report 3 to 6 interview stages depending on the track (7 distinct rounds across all tracks). Below: what each round tests and how to prepare, the path by track, the timeline, pay and a 4-week prep plan, drawn from candidate reports and SIG's own recruiting pages.
SIG interview: quick answer
- StagesBy track: Trader / Quant Researcher: 6 · Software Engineer / Quant Strategy Developer: 3 (7 distinct rounds across all tracks)
- Online assessmentProblem Solving Assessment: 17 questions in 60 minutes on Mettl (some 2026 reports: HackerRank), calculator allowed; developers take a CodeSignal test
- TimelineOutside guides put the process at two to eight weeks (most often two to four), with about a week between rounds and offers one to two weeks after the final; some candidates describe much longer loops.
- Final roundOnsite / Superday: Onsite · multiple 1-hr rounds + dinner
- Pay (candidate-reported)Trader / Quant Researcher, New grad: $200k – $350k total comp
- RolesTrader / Quant Researcher, Quant Strategy Developer, Software Engineer
Preparing for SIG? Work the rounds in order in the free SIG interview funnel, or start with the free online-assessment sample (no signup).
The SIG interview process at a glance
| # | Round | Format and length | Who takes it | Prep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Problem-Solving Assessment | 17 questions · 60 min · Mettl (some reports: HackerRank) | All tracks (developers take a CodeSignal coding version) | OA guidePractice |
| 2 | Technical HR / Recruiter Screen | 30–45 min · audio Zoom | All tracks | GuidePractice |
| 3 | Quant / Technical Phone | 45 to 60 min · 1 to 2 rounds · phone or video | Trader / Quant Researcher | GuidePractice |
| 4 | Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation | 3-day take-home · then an on-site project presentation round | Trader / Quant Researcher | GuidePractice |
| 5 | Market-Making Game + EV Games | Interactive · with a trader | Trader / Quant Researcher | GuidePractice |
| 6 | Onsite / Superday | Onsite · multiple 1-hr rounds + dinner | Trader / Quant Researcher | GuidePractice |
| 7 | SWE / Quant-Dev Coding + Systems | Phone + onsite · C++ / algorithms / system design | Software Engineer / Quant Strategy Developer | GuidePractice |
Stages are listed in the order candidates report them. Formats come from candidate reports and change between cycles, offices and teams; the "Who takes it" column shows which track each round belongs to.
How the SIG process differs by track
SIG runs separate loops for different roles. Here is the path each track reports, in order:
- Trader / Quant Researcher (6 stages): Problem-Solving Assessment → Technical HR / Recruiter Screen → Quant / Technical Phone → Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation → Market-Making Game + EV Games → Onsite / Superday
Trading and research share one funnel. The take-home data exercise is reported for quant research candidates, and the number of technical calls varies (sometimes one, sometimes none). - Software Engineer / Quant Strategy Developer (3 stages): Problem-Solving Assessment → Technical HR / Recruiter Screen → SWE / Quant-Dev Coding + Systems
Developers take a CodeSignal coding test instead of the Problem Solving Assessment, then a recruiter round with live coding and an onsite of coding and low-level design.
Not sure which track fits you? See quant trader vs quant researcher.
Every SIG round: what it tests and how to prepare
1Problem-Solving Assessment
A timed Problem Solving Assessment: 17 questions in 60 minutes on Mettl (some 2026 reports name HackerRank), calculator allowed, answers entered as integers or fractions. It covers logic and probability: Bayesian reasoning, expected value, combinatorics and short Markov-chain setups. Reports differ on whether it arrives before or after the resume screen. Software candidates take a CodeSignal coding test instead (about four problems in 70 minutes).
How to prepare
- Give answers as integers or fractions; decimals can be marked wrong.
- You have about seven days to start once the link arrives. Do not switch browser tabs during the test.
- Practice setting up a Bayes table quickly: conditional probability carries much of the test.
2Technical HR / Recruiter Screen
Despite the name, this call is technical. After a short introduction and a chat about your interests, the recruiter reads out two or three probability or brain-teaser questions and you work them on paper. Common families: uniform-arrival overlaps, coin-pattern waiting times, order statistics and geometric probability.
Question types: mostly probability, expectation and combinatorics, especially discrete probability, conditional probability, expected value and independence. Latest candidate report for this round: Jan 2026.
How to prepare
- Narrate your reasoning. It's verbal — they're scoring how clearly you explain the setup and the intuition, not just the final number.
- Have the geometric-probability + coin-pattern classics reflexive (uniform-arrival overlaps, Penney's-game pattern races) — they recur almost every loop.
- Lead with the interests chat. Genuinely mentioning poker/bridge/mahjong lands well with SIG's culture.
Full Technical HR / Recruiter Screen guide →Practice this round (74 questions) →
3Quant / Technical Phone
A harder probability round with a senior trader, often built around a dice game in which you choose which dice to reroll to improve your chance of a winning hand. Expect an OLS or regression-efficiency derivation and an algorithm question discussed at the level of approach and complexity rather than live code.
Question types: mostly probability, expectation and linear algebra, especially conditional probability, expected value, discrete probability and independence. Latest candidate report for this round: Jan 2026.
How to prepare
- The mahjong-dice game rewards EV estimation, not exact combinatorics. Reason about which reroll most improves your completion odds and roughly by how much.
- Be ready to derive OLS (β̂ and Var(β̂)) and explain when the estimator is efficient.
- For the algorithm question, talk approach + complexity — they rarely want you to type code, just reason cleanly.
Full Quant / Technical Phone guide →Practice this round (60 questions) →
4Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation
Quant research candidates in the 2027 cycle report a three-day take-home on one stock's trade data: design a trading strategy under position and timing limits, submit a short report with code, then present it on site to reviewers who probe your assumptions and data choices.
Question types: mostly market microstructure.
How to prepare
- Frame it as strategic interaction, not just statistics. The reviewers steer you toward game-theory reasoning about how other traders respond — anticipate that.
- Defend your EDA and assumptions explicitly. One reviewer's whole job is to stress-test your data choices; show you considered look-ahead bias and overfitting.
- Make the strategy's edge legible. A clear, well-justified simple strategy beats an opaque complex one.
Full Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation guide →Practice this round (1 question) →
5Market-Making Game + EV Games
SIG's games-as-interview round: quote a bid/ask spread on an uncertain value, adjusting as a trader trades against you; explain every choice. Poker-style EV games such as the AKQ betting game probe EV and risk. Some older candidate reports also mention Acey-Deucy; other reports describe live poker as part of SIG's training culture rather than the interview.
Question types: mostly expectation, game theory and market microstructure, especially expected value.
How to prepare
- Quote a credible, defensible spread and adjust. Start wider when you're uncertain, tighten as info arrives, and always be able to justify the level.
- AKQ / poker = pure EV + bluffing math. Know the mixed strategy; explain when to bet/fold in expectation terms.
- Manage risk, not just edge. They reward discipline and clear reasoning over aggressive P&L.
Full Market-Making Game + EV Games guide →Practice this round (4 questions) →
6Onsite / Superday
The Super Day, usually at SIG's Bala Cynwyd office near Philadelphia: expected-value games and making markets, a group auction game against the other candidates, an HR interview of about 30 minutes, office and trading-floor tours, and often a dinner with a young trader. Some older reports mention live poker; most sources describe poker as part of SIG's training culture rather than the interview.
Question types: mostly probability, expectation and combinatorics, especially discrete probability, expected value, conditional probability and symmetry. Latest candidate report for this round: Jan 2026.
How to prepare
- Open-ended estimation wants assumptions and a range: state your model and give an interval, not a single number.
- If a poker-style game comes up, play it for expected value. Show bet-sizing discipline and explain each decision; most recent reports describe AKQ-style EV games rather than a live poker table.
- Pace yourself across a long day: eat the dinner, stay composed and keep narrating your reasoning.
Full Onsite / Superday guide →Practice this round (46 questions) →
7SWE / Quant-Dev Coding + Systems
The engineering funnel. After the CodeSignal test, a C++ phone screen centred on building a standard container from scratch (growth policy, memory management, exception safety, ownership), then an onsite covering pointers, polymorphism and virtual functions, an order-book system design (price-level matching and the data structures behind it) and live C++ debugging.
Question types: mostly coding, especially arrays, data structures, string algorithms and complexity analysis. Latest candidate report for this round: Jun 2026.
How to prepare
- Be able to implement a vector end-to-end. Growth policy, allocation/deallocation, exception safety, and move semantics — this is the signature SIG dev question.
- Know the trade-book design. Price-level matching with the right data structure (sorted map vs heaps) and the trade-offs.
- C++ internals come up live: virtual dispatch/vtables, smart pointers, RAII, struct padding.
Full SWE / Quant-Dev Coding + Systems guide →Practice this round (19 questions) →
Practice the SIG rounds in order
Each round in the SIG funnel has its own practice set, with worked solutions and progress tracking. A free account saves your progress across rounds.
Regional differences
SIG's Sydney graduate trader advert lists the steps as application, an online assessment (quantitative and problem solving), phone interviews (behavioural and technical), an office interview that includes a trader interview, a trade-floor visit and an office tour, then an offer.
Timeline
- Two outside guides put the whole process at two to eight weeks, most often two to four, with about a week between rounds and an offer one to two weeks after the final stage. Some QuantVault candidate reports describe loops of about two months.
- You have about seven days to start the online assessment once the link arrives.
- One outside guide reports that US summer roles are posted 11 to 12 months ahead and that Sydney intern roles post around December.
- Candidates often report slow replies and reschedules, so a silence is not necessarily a rejection.
Recent changes
- For trader roles, one outside guide reports that SIG replaced the 20-minute Quantitative Evaluation with the 60-minute Problem Solving Assessment in 2026.
- QuantVault candidates in the 2027 cycle report new question families on the assessment.
Intern vs full-time
The Problem Solving Assessment is reported for intern applicants as well as graduates. No other difference between the intern and graduate loops is documented in the reports we have.
A 4-week SIG prep plan
Built from the order of SIG's rounds on the Trader / Quant Researcher path and the topics in each round's practice set. Compress it if your first interview is sooner. Other tracks can swap in their own rounds from the table above.
| When | Focus | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Foundations | Review probability, expectation and coding, the topics that dominate SIG's practice sets. Start with Probability course and Quant coding course. Work the easy and medium questions in the SIG question set. |
| Week 2 | Early rounds: Problem-Solving Assessment, Technical HR / Recruiter Screen and Quant / Technical Phone | Practice probability, expectation and combinatorics under time pressure, and take the free OA sample (format notes in the OA guide). Talk every answer through out loud; interviewers score the reasoning. |
| Week 3 | Later rounds: Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation, Market-Making Game + EV Games and Onsite / Superday | Move to combinatorics, game theory and brain teasers. Rehearse quoting markets with the Make a Market game and read the market-making game guide. Read how quant superdays work. |
| Week 4 | Rehearse the full loop | Run each practice round in order, redo the questions you missed, and prepare two project stories plus a specific answer to "why SIG?" (see behavioral questions at trading firms). |
SIG pay
| Role | Level | Total comp | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trader / Quant Researcher | New grad | $200k – $350k | Includes sign-on + first-year bonus; traders go through a paid poker/trading training class. Mid-tier vs CitSec/HRT but with strong upside. |
| Quant Strategy Developer / SWE | New grad | $180k – $300k | Strong engineering comp; C++-heavy roles. Philadelphia cost-of-living is favorable. |
Total compensation means base salary plus bonus and any sign-on, as candidates self-report it. Job postings usually show base salary only, so posted figures and outside salary pages often look lower. Rough ranges, NOT offers. SIG new-grad comp is mid-tier among the top market makers; trader comp is bonus-driven. Perks (free food, a high-return internal SIG fund) are frequently called out. Source: Candidate self-reports (levels.fyi, Glassdoor, and candidate forums) — not employer-verified. Last updated May 29, 2026.
Full breakdown by level: SIG salary guide.
SIG teams and what their interviews test
SIG barely distinguishes Quant Research from Systematic Trading: they share one probability/EV-heavy funnel (OA → technical HR → quant phone → take-home data task for research → market-making and EV games → Philadelphia onsite). Software Engineers / Quant Strategy Developers run a separate C++/algorithms + systems-design funnel. A small Capital-Markets track uses a finance-flavored valuation OA.
| Tracks | What it does | What its interviews test |
|---|---|---|
| Trader / Quant Researcher Trader / QR | Options market making and systematic strategy research, judged by P&L. Heavy poker/EV training. | Problem-Solving OA → technical HR (green-book probability) → quant phone (incl. a 5-dice mahjong game) → take-home data task (research) → market-making and EV games → Philadelphia onsite. |
| Quant Strategy Developer / SWE Software Engineer | Trading systems and strategy infrastructure in C++ / Python. | See the round-by-round section above. |
| Capital Markets / Equity Research Analyst | Valuation and markets coverage (small track, real finance background needed). | A finance-flavored OA (23 questions / 25 min): EV stats, option/equity valuation, and general market knowledge. |
About SIG
| Firm type | Proprietary options market maker |
|---|---|
| Trading style | Poker, game-theory & EV culture · Options / ETF market making |
| Founded | 1987 |
| Headquarters | Bala Cynwyd, PA |
| Other offices | New York, Dublin, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong |
| Capital | Proprietary (private) |
| Employees | ~3,000+ |
| Reported performance | ~$3-6B/yr trading P&L (est.) |
| OA calculator | Allowed |
| OA answer format | Integers or fractions; decimals may be marked wrong |
| Time to start the OA | About 7 days from the invite |
Founded 1987 — built on poker
Susquehanna International Group was founded in 1987 near Philadelphia by a group of former options traders, several of them serious poker players. Game theory and poker are baked into the firm: new traders go through a months-long class that explicitly uses poker to teach EV, risk, and decision-making under uncertainty.
Long and flaky process
Reports differ on length: outside guides put the process at two to eight weeks, while some candidates describe loops of 8 to 11 rounds over about two months. Most of it is Philadelphia (Bala Cynwyd) based, sometimes NYC. Budget time and don't read silence as a no.
Culture
Built on poker and game theory — new traders go through a months-long trading-and-poker training class. EV thinking and decision-making under uncertainty are the whole game; mentioning poker / bridge / mahjong genuinely helps in fit chats.
What the interviews feel like
Probability-and-EV heavy with a strong games streak — market-making spread games, the AKQ betting game and a 5-dice mahjong-style game recur; some older reports also mention Acey-Deucy poker. They reward intuitive, well-explained EV reasoning over textbook derivations.
Practice for SIG on QuantVault
Practice
Courses
Games and drills
Further reading
- How quant superdays work
- Market-making game interview guide
- Behavioral questions at trading firms
- C++ and low-latency interview questions
- Fermi estimation questions
- The quant interview process, explained
Similar firms to compare
Firms with a similar business and interview style. Many candidates interview at several of them in the same cycle.
Sources and how this guide is built
- Updated October 20, 2026; firm data last reviewed October 9, 2026; pay last updated May 29, 2026.
- Round detail draws on 84 questions candidates report from SIG interviews (the most recent report across all rounds is from Jun 2026). A separate curated SIG question set of 98 problems collects the most useful practice for this firm.
- Public candidate reports and outside interview guides are cross-checked against each other. Where they disagree the page says "reports differ"; details from a single source are marked as candidate reports.
- No actual interview questions are reproduced on this page. The questions, with worked solutions, are in the practice rounds.
SIG interview FAQ
How many rounds are in the SIG interview?
It depends on the track: Trader / Quant Researcher: 6; Software Engineer / Quant Strategy Developer: 3 stages. Across all tracks candidates report 7 distinct rounds: Problem-Solving Assessment, Technical HR / Recruiter Screen, Quant / Technical Phone, Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation, Market-Making Game + EV Games, Onsite / Superday, SWE / Quant-Dev Coding + Systems.
Does the SIG process differ by role?
Yes. Trader / Quant Researcher: Problem-Solving Assessment, Technical HR / Recruiter Screen, Quant / Technical Phone, Take-Home Data Exercise + On-Site Presentation, Market-Making Game + EV Games, Onsite / Superday. Software Engineer / Quant Strategy Developer: Problem-Solving Assessment, Technical HR / Recruiter Screen, SWE / Quant-Dev Coding + Systems.
How much does SIG pay?
Candidate-reported total compensation: Trader / Quant Researcher (New grad) $200k – $350k; Quant Strategy Developer / SWE (New grad) $180k – $300k. These are self-reported totals including bonus, not offers; job postings usually list base salary only.
How should I prepare for the SIG interview?
Prepare round by round over about four weeks: foundations first, then the early rounds (Problem-Solving Assessment, Technical HR / Recruiter Screen, Quant / Technical Phone), then the later rounds, then a full rehearsal. Each round has its own practice set on QuantVault, and the online assessment has a dedicated guide.
What does SIG do?
Susquehanna (SIG) is a proprietary options market maker headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, PA. Susquehanna International Group was founded in 1987 near Philadelphia by a group of former options traders, several of them serious poker players.
Do I need to play poker at the SIG interview?
Reports differ. Two outside guides describe poker as part of SIG's training culture after you join, and one found no recent candidate report of a live poker round. Some older QuantVault candidate reports mention poker at the onsite. Poker-style expected-value games such as the AKQ game are reported more widely.
Can I use a calculator on the SIG OA?
Yes. Give answers as integers or fractions, since decimals may be marked wrong. You can flag and revisit questions on the Problem Solving Assessment, but switching browser tabs can end the test.
Is the OA sent before or after the CV is read?
Reports differ. QuantVault candidate reports say the test arrives before the resume is reviewed, one outside guide says it follows a CV screen, and another says the order is unconfirmed.
How long does the SIG process take?
Reports differ. Outside guides put it at two to eight weeks, most often two to four, with about a week between rounds. Some QuantVault reports describe loops of about two months.
Is there more than one SIG online test?
Yes. Besides the 60-minute Problem Solving Assessment, SIG has used a shorter Quantitative Evaluation of about 20 minutes in which you cannot go back to earlier questions.
Is there a group exercise at the Super Day?
Yes. Candidates describe a physical auction or bidding board game played against the other candidates.
Start preparing for SIG
Open the interactive SIG interview funnel: every stage with its practice set, from the first screen to the final round. Create a free account to save your progress.