The Quadrature Capital Interview Process

Quadrature hires a small class each year from Cambridge and a few peer universities, and the bar sits on pure mathematics over trading intuition.

Quadrature Capital runs one of the smallest graduate classes of any major systematic fund, and its interview process reflects that scale: four or five rounds, heavily weighted toward pure mathematics and probability, with comparatively little emphasis on markets knowledge or trading intuition. Founded by former GSA Capital quants and based in Cambridge with a London office, the firm hires a disproportionate share of its researchers from Cambridge itself, along with a small number from Oxford, Imperial and a short list of continental universities strong in mathematics or theoretical physics.

Quadrature's founders came from academic mathematics and physics backgrounds before moving into systematic trading, and the firm's screening reflects that lineage: a doctorate or a strong undergraduate record in mathematics, physics, or a closely related quantitative field carries more weight here than a finance or economics degree would. A candidate's placement in the Putnam Competition, a national mathematical olympiad, or a strong record of published research is read as a genuine signal rather than a nice-to-have line on the CV.

Compared with a US market maker, Quadrature spends far less interview time on trading games or market-making simulations and far more on abstract probability, combinatorics and proof-based problem solving, closer in style to a mathematics finals exam than a trading floor tryout.

There is no large-scale online test comparable to what a bank graduate scheme runs; instead, a recruiter or researcher conducts an initial phone conversation focused on the candidate's academic background and research interests, followed quickly by a first technical interview. The absence of a broad online filter means the CV and academic transcript do more of the early filtering work than they would at a firm running thousands of candidates through an automated test.

Candidates who want to rehearse the style of reasoning this stage expects can work through combinatorics and probability sets on practice, since Quadrature's interviewers tend to favour problems with an elegant closed-form answer over ones that reward brute computation.