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SWE new grad loop at Citadel Chicago: what actually happened

jp_newgrad · 5 replies

went through the full loop last fall, chicago office, new grad SWE track. sharing because i couldn't find anything specific when i was prepping.

rounds: 1 phone screen with a recruiter (mostly resume, motivations, 20 min) 1 technical phone screen: 2 LC medium/hard problems, 45 min, no systems design onsite: 5 rounds back to back. two coding, one systems design, one CS fundamentals (OS, networking, concurrency), one "quantitative reasoning" which was probability and estimation problems, not pure algo

the systems design round was different than FAANG. they gave a trading-adjacent scenario: design a low-latency order routing system. they didn't care much about storage at scale. they cared about where the microseconds go and how you'd reduce them. if you've only done "design twitter" prep you'll feel it.

the quant round caught me off guard. stuff like: you have a biased coin, what's the expected number of flips to get two heads in a row? and conditional probability scenarios. i'm a CS person, not a math person, so i burned time on that one.

what mattered: every interviewer wanted you to narrate your thinking. silence is bad here. they'd let you dig a hole and then ask "is that the approach you want to commit to?" which is a hint if you catch it.

feedback loop was fast: got a call 4 days after the onsite. offer came with a tight deadline.

5 replies

ml_mike

the coin flip expected value thing is a classic. if you haven't seen the "geometric series on conditional states" framing for those problems, look it up before you go in. it's the kind of thing that takes 3 minutes once you know the trick and 20 minutes if you're deriving from scratch in an interview.

numbers_only

exactly. i had seen it but hadn't drilled it. knew the concept, blanked on execution under pressure. practice the actual mechanics not just the idea.

backend_bekah

the low-latency systems design angle is real. i had almost the same scenario. they want you to talk about cache locality, CPU branch prediction, lock-free data structures. it's a completely different frame than throughput-at-scale. if you've done any fintech infra work it maps, but if your background is web services you need to do some reading.

newgrad_neil

did the offer have room to negotiate or is it take-it-or-leave-it? i've heard citadel offers are firm

numbers_only

i tried. recruiter said the new grad band is set, but signing bonus had a little flex. not much. this isn't a place where you should expect a big negotiation dance.