The G-Research Interview Process for Quant Researchers

G-Research runs five stages from London, and the academic transcript carries more weight here than at a US proprietary trading firm.

G-Research runs a five-stage process for quant researcher roles: an online numerical and coding assessment, one or two technical phone screens, a take-home or timed research exercise, and a final assessment day in London built around statistics, probability and machine learning. The firm hires most of its graduate class from a narrow set of universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College and a handful of continental European schools, and candidates from outside that pipeline should expect the transcript and any math competition results on the CV to be read closely before a first call is booked.

A candidate who has prepared for Jane Street or Citadel Securities style interviews arrives at G-Research expecting a live trading game or a rapid-fire mental arithmetic round early in the process. G-Research runs closer to a research lab than a trading floor: the early filters weight degree classification, specifically a First or a high 2:1 from a target university, more heavily than a US shop typically does, and a strong placing in the Putnam, the IMO or a national mathematics olympiad on the CV moves a file to the top of a recruiter's queue.

The firm's roles split between systematic researchers who build signals and infrastructure engineers who support them, and the interview loop is tailored to which track a candidate applied for. Researcher candidates see more probability and statistics; engineering candidates see more system design and language-specific coding, usually in Python or C++.

The first stage is a timed online test combining numerical reasoning with a short coding exercise, usually completed in a browser-based environment rather than a downloaded IDE. The coding half tests algorithmic fundamentals, sorting, searching, basic data structures, rather than anything specific to finance, and candidates who have worked through a broad set of practice questions on the interview questions bank tend to finish with time to review their answers rather than racing the clock.

Scores on this stage are compared across the full applicant pool rather than against a fixed pass mark, so a candidate who has not touched competitive coding in a year benefits from a week of timed drilling on practice sessions before sitting it.