By Sarah Butcher | Dice | August 7, 2020
If you’re an experienced quant applying for a new role in an investment bank, you might presume that you’ll be able to coast through the interview process. Not necessarily.
In the past five years, Dirk Bester, a finance quant with a PhD in Bayesian algorithmic design, has interviewed everywhere from Barclays to Blackrock, to BNP Paribas, Cumulus, G-Research, Goldman Sachs, GSA Capital, J.P. Morgan, Man Group, Oxford Asset Management, RBC, RBS, Squarepoint Capital, Two Sigma, UBS, and Winton Capital. Bester has written a detailed guide to his quant interview experiences and posted it to Github.
Whether you want to become a quant/strat, or you simply want to remain employed as one, Bester’s guide is mandatory reading.
Bester has a job but occasionally still interviews at rival banks. Other recent quant interviewees also send him the questions they’ve recently encountered. He says it’s becoming apparent that the questions being asked in quant interviews are evolving.
“There are more coding questions and coding types of brain teasers,” Bester said. “If you go for a quant finance interview today, you will be required to know a lot about algorithms and data structures. The questions you encounter are similar to the questions you get at Google or Facebook.”
