HRT
HireRight Holdings Corporation
stock NYSE

Graduating senior, unfortunately failed at my last chance for quant internships. Doing AI infra at FAANG NG instead. Realistically would only take JS/HRT postgrad, is there any way to maximize my odds of reinterviewing(made it to final onsites). Also was curious abt salary progression and whether it would be worth trying or instead pivot to AI labs instead.

no not at all, the places that have an amazing platform and are expanding into new areas (see HRT's move into mft) have some of the best growth opportunities

I just got a job at a (relatively) small firm. No idea how I got it or why they picked me, but I’m riding with it.
My question is what JS or HRT are doing to make more than HFT/ULLT. I would have naively thought that ULLT was the fastest way to make money if you could get it to work.

What you are saying mostly applicable for only the big names you mentioned, not quant industry itself. Firstly, unlike IB or consulting quant doesn’t do nepo recruiting. It might have been your observation but that’s not a fact, especially for the firms you mentioned. Most sane managers wouldn’t be leaving billions of dollars assets for a dumb nepo kid to handle. In IB or PE or consulting, you can do that cause you don’t need any skills besides yapping and capping. And even in lesser known firms where the nepo practices exist, the nepo kids surely wouldn’t be in a quant position. They will probably be the useless manager who barfing around the quants, telling them to do things while not knowing shit.
School elitism is true, but nowhere to the extent of finance again. You see people from those 5 schools mainly because those 5 schools were most Olympiad kids go. And again it’s only true for the big names like HRT. There are hundreds of quant firms in the country which routinely recruit students from more moderate universities like UT Austin, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, Duke, UCSD, Purdue etc (by moderate I mean outside of the big 5). There are gas and energy trading firms in Texas and Florida who regularly come to these schools. But they also pay less, most of them pay 180K total in average in first year. I did two quant internships, both of them were at two moderately sized firms, and met a bunch of ppl from various state and mid tier unis.
Lastly, yes for Jane street, HRT, I think it would be odd to find someone who wasn’t a math or coding geek in middle school. My friend who is international and won medals in 3 different international olympiads (people can’t imagine how insane that is), got rejected by all top quant firms. He reached the final rounds in most of them. He shared some of the questions with me, they ask so many hardcore open ended problems (even in trading positions) which is impossible to navigate if you don’t have years of experience in solving Olympiad problems.

HRT algodev R2

HRT, CitSec, Jump, Optiver D1, Headlands, Radix, IMC

I think a bunch of MM are still competing on latency alone… but the margins have been squeezing… there are some physical limitations to the amount of nanoseconds you can chip away… so a lot of MM started diversifying from HFT strategies to more short term, medium term (i.e. HRT entering derivatives strategies usually used by HF or CitSec entering structured products) or even long term strategies (i.e. JS investing in the Situational Awareness fund).

HRT leans heavily into low level systems knowledge and practical coding compared to standard tech firms, and they expect you to know how your code talks to the hardware. You will run into questions on memory layout, cache coherence, virtual memory, paging, multithreading, and network protocols, alongside standard data structures and algorithmic problems. When you compare HRT to Citadel and Jane Street, Citadel often focuses on intense algorithm problem solving and clean object oriented design, Jane Street emphasizes correctness, types, and architectural reasoning, and HRT really digs into low level execution speed, custom data structures, and raw systems performance.

To handle HRT alongside Citadel and Jane Street, practice explaining your thought process out loud when optimizing for latency and throughput, and make sure you can write clean, bug free code under time pressure without stumbling on edge cases. You will want to practice building things like custom queues, parsers, and lock free primitives from scratch, because HRT interviewers love probing into how standard library components actually operate under the hood. To help candidates perform consistently across demanding quant engineering loops, my team designed an [interviews.chat](http://interviews.chat) that gives people the confidence and edge to land competitive offers at top trading firms.

Yeah DRW is a sleeper for ULL. Faster than JS/HRT in places by far

I don't think there is one firm that's absolutely fastest in every trade. There is latency arb in intra and inter exchange. For intra trades, it's probably down to who has the best asics platform for receiving and sending orders. Fpga just doesn't cut it for those. Inter exchange, I think different companies are owning different "best line", I heard IMC has the best Korea to some place, or Malaysia or Vietnam. Jump once had the fastest Europe to somewhere, but I think it's now leveled. Pure ultra low latency game is just not that lucrative as there isn't that much arbing opportunities anymore. Everyone is getting smarter and faster to not leave those stupid arbing opportunity on the book. You either get better, or you die. You can contribute to 30% of the entire volume of ES, doing ultra low latency, but probably still make much less than JS or HRT, if you make like only a few dollars per trade.

Lmao HRT is not that ULL competitive. 

Jane Street, Citadel, HRT, Optiver, Tower Research

JS is a very friendly culturefirm (No NC, no exploding offers). Same with HRT. so I would be surprised if either of them blacklisted candidates that they found promising but couldn’t take due to Headcount in previous years.

Trade interview questions – want HRT Algo Dev / Jump QR-QT summers