Tower Research

1. Application

   One posting, "Quantitative Trader/Researcher Intern", for bachelor's, master's and PhD students; it opens in the first week of July. The firm is a set of independent trading teams and each hires for itself: CVs sit in a pool, a team that likes yours asks recruiting to set up a call, and you are not told which team until you meet them. Two teams can run you at once. Most applicants never hear back, and the class is a handful of seats. Some teams send a HackerRank first, about two hours of Python, probability and machine-learning questions, sometimes sat in the office on the day of the interviews; most go straight to a call. Applicants to this posting are sometimes moved to the quantitative developer one, which starts with a coding assessment.

2. First round

   Virtual interview · Up to 1 hour

   A video call with a researcher or the portfolio manager of the team that picked you. About three quarters of it is one project or your last internship, followed up in detail; the rest is four or five short questions on correlation, regression and probability, answered aloud. The team has asked the same questions for years. No trading game and no mental arithmetic, under either job title.

   Sit this round →

3. Team interviews

   Virtual interview · 2–4 × 30–60 min

   One-to-one interviews with the rest of the team, a day or two apart or back to back: a researcher on regression and the statistics of strategies, a fast run of probability questions where you are not told whether you were right, and a developer with a shared editor who asks you to bring the time and memory down once the code works. How many you get depends on the team: two is common, and some teams bring finalists to the office for a day of seven or eight interviews, half of them with a second team. A few teams set a take-home project of up to a week in place of some of this.

   statisticsSit this round →

   probabilitySit this round →

   codingSit this round →

4. Portfolio manager

   Virtual interview · ~1 hour

   The head of the team. One paper or project presented and interrupted line by line, with deliberate pressure; then open questions about markets and data that need no finance; then what you want to work on. On teams where the portfolio manager took the first round, this conversation comes first and the team interviews end the loop.

   Sit this round →

5. References and offer

   Recruiting asks for references, and the offer comes from the team that interviewed you: you spend the summer on that team and there is no matching afterwards. If two teams interviewed you, either can make the offer.

Reconstructed from first-hand candidate reports and the firm's own published material. Problems in this track are original and format-faithful; nothing is copied from a live interview.