AQR Captial Interview Experience for Software Engineer

This opportunity was only open to students who had received a PPO from other companies as per the placement cell of the college.

Resume Screening Round

Required some Quant Exposure, keywords like Quant, Finance, Worldquant, and Alpha, helped me get shortlisted. I worked as a part-time consultant in WorldQuant Challenges to make optimal Alphas. This criterion is unofficial after discussion with the folks who got shortlisted and who didn’t get shortlisted.

Coding/Quant Round

Hackerrank | 2 hours | 25 MCQs- 5 questions from Probability and Statistics, 5 questions from Quantitative Mathematics, 5 from Logical Reasoning, 8 from CS Core Fundamentals- OOPs, DBMS, OS, Networking, 2 coding questions- Longest Common Subsequence (2D DP) and 1 question to find sum in range using Segment Tree.

I solved all the coding questions, and around 20 MCQs correctly for sure. No negative marking.

Interview Round-1 (Technical)

Grilled on CS Core concepts- especially Networking and Operating Systems for around 30 minutes. Later, a brief discussion for 30 minutes on my Projects. The interview lasted for 1 hour. They told me the interview is non-elimination and has a scoring pattern where they will keep giving scores for each round, in the end it will be summed up, and depending on the final score they will give the verdict.

Interview Round-2 (Technical)

DSA Question- One distinct element from array having all other elements thrice

These types of learning questions are literally torture for me- I find these very difficult. Spend around 30 minutes on this question but was not able to solve it. Later he discussed my projects and why am I looking to find opportunities in Finance. I think so, I screwed up this round.

Interview Round-3 (Technical)

Some questions on Probability- especially Bayes Theorem and Conditional Probability- Normal Bell Curve function discussion. I had studied them and could answer them. Later, he asked me to design a minesweeper using Object Oriented Programming.

He wanted to test my Design techniques and approaches. This problem took around 1 hour, we discussed all the edge cases. The round lasted for around 1 hour and 15 minutes.

VERDICT: REJECTED

There was also Round 4 which was an HR Round (as discussed with other people) where they discussed Negotiation of the Compensation. I was not called for that. My total score might not have crossed their threshold.