How Citadel interviews
Citadel publishes a four-step engineering interview process that typically runs about eight weeks end-to-end: a 45-minute first-round video covering coding, data structures and algorithms; a second round of three 45-minute interviews mixing technical and behavioural questions; a leadership interview with a senior engineer once a hiring team expresses interest; and a final-review team-match step.
The quantitative research loop has the same four-step shape but is compressed to roughly four to five weeks, with onsite second rounds of three to five 60-minute interviews. Because a candidate's profile is reviewed across both Citadel and Citadel Securities, the sister market maker also owned by Ken Griffin, the leadership round can multiply if more than one team is interested. An eight-week loop with a team-match step sits at the long end of buy-side timelines, so candidates running it in parallel are often still in process here as bank application windows elsewhere close.