# How Akuna Capital and Five Rings screen new grads

Source: https://www.techinterview.org/post/3233476799/akuna-capital-five-rings-interview-guide/
Updated: 2026-07-21 · techinterview.org

The Akuna math test gives you eight minutes to answer eighty arithmetic questions. Six seconds each. It's the first wall, and it knocks out more candidates than any brainteaser later in the process. If you can't rattle off 14 × 23 or convert 7/8 to a decimal without a calculator, the rest of the pipeline never opens up.

Akuna Capital and Five Rings both hire new grads into trading and engineering seats, both pay near the top of the market, and both filter hard on raw speed before anyone asks you a single thing about options or order books. They go about it differently. Akuna is a Chicago options market maker that runs a long, structured funnel with a lot of timed assessments up front. Five Rings is a New York quant shop whose loop reads a lot like Jane Street, sometimes a notch more technical. Knowing which firm you're prepping for changes what you drill.

## Akuna's funnel is front-loaded with timed tests

The order matters because each stage gates the next, and the early ones are automated. First comes the math test: 80 questions, 8 minutes, covering multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, and percentages. Then a sequences test, usually 24 questions in about 12 minutes, where you infer the pattern and give the next term. Neither rewards cleverness. They reward having done a few thousand reps so arithmetic is muscle memory. People who train on Zetamac or the Akuna practice sets for two or three weeks clear it; people who wing it don't.

If the math clears, most tracks hit a HackerRank coding round with two or three problems, easy to medium, think arrays, hash maps, a bit of greedy or simulation. The trading track wants to see you can write correct code; the software track goes deeper and expects clean complexity and edge-case handling. After that there's a recorded video stage (Akuna runs it through VidCruiter) that includes a letter-betting game where you decide how much to wager on guesses under uncertainty. It's testing whether you size bets sensibly when you don't know the answer, which is the whole job in miniature.

Clear those and you get a technical phone interview with an actual trader. This is where market-making questions, expected-value problems, and light options theory show up, mixed with brainteasers. The final stage is a Super Day in Chicago: four or five back-to-back 45-minute interviews, a live trading game against other candidates and traders, and lunch with the team. The trading game is the part people underestimate. You're quoting bid-ask on some made-up asset, updating on information the room reveals, and they're watching whether you widen when you're unsure and tighten when you have an edge.

One thing worth knowing about Akuna specifically: they train new traders heavily and screen for people who update fast on feedback. In behavioral moments, a story where you changed your mind after someone corrected you lands better than a story where you gutted it out and were proved right.

## Five Rings runs a shorter, Jane-Street-shaped loop

Five Rings compresses the early filtering into fewer, harder conversations. The recruiter screen isn't a formality. It often opens with Fermi estimation under a tight clock: how many gallons of paint to cover a Boeing 747, how many golf balls fit in a school bus, that genre, except they care about the structure of your reasoning and how quickly you produce a defensible number, not the number itself. Say your assumptions out loud, keep the arithmetic clean, land somewhere.

Next is usually a first-round video with traders, then a full loop. For more senior candidates that loop has run around six and a half hours over Zoom, a mix of 1:1 and 2:1 sessions with developers, quants, and traders. New-grad loops are shorter but the same shape. The quant track leans on probability and statistics: expected value, conditional probability, Bayesian updating, distributions, and the occasional Markov-chain setup. Keep pencil and paper ready, because they will give you problems you can't hold entirely in your head.

The software track at Five Rings is where the Jane Street comparison bites hardest. It's almost entirely technical, sometimes described as more technical than Jane Street, with weight on low-latency systems thinking, data structures, and reasoning about what your code actually does on the machine. If you show up to a dev loop expecting culture-fit chit-chat, you'll be caught flat.

| Dimension | Akuna Capital | Five Rings |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Main office | Chicago (plus Boston, Shanghai, Sydney) | New York |
| Core business | Options market making | Quantitative proprietary trading |
| First filter | 80-question math test in 8 minutes, then a sequences test | Fermi estimation in the recruiter screen, under time pressure |
| Coding round | HackerRank, 2-3 problems, easy to medium | Heavier technical loop; SWE track compared to Jane Street |
| Signature round | Chicago Super Day with a live trading game | Multi-hour Zoom loop, 1:1 and 2:1 with traders, quants, developers |
| What they weight most | Arithmetic speed, bet sizing, coachability | Probability depth, estimation, systems reasoning |

## The questions that actually come up

Across both firms the trading-side questions cluster around a few recurring shapes. A representative sample, phrased close to how they land in the room:

- You flip a fair coin until the first heads. What's the expected number of flips? Now the expected number of flips to get two heads in a row?

- I'm rolling a die and paying you the face value, but you can re-roll once if you don't like the first result. What's a fair price for this game?

- A stock is at 100. There's a 60% chance it goes to 110 and 40% it goes to 90. Make me a market on where it settles, then I'll trade against you.

- Estimate the number of tennis balls that fit inside a 747. Talk me through it.

- You've seen three red cards in a row off a freshly shuffled deck. What's your probability the next card is red, and how do you update?

The pattern behind them is expected value plus updating. The re-roll die question is the classic: you keep the first roll only when it beats the expected value of a fresh roll, which is 3.5, so you hold 4, 5, or 6 and re-roll otherwise, giving a fair price of 4.25. What they're really watching is whether you get there calmly and can defend the logic when someone pushes back.

## Where prep time actually pays off

Mental arithmetic pays back the most per hour, because it gates everything at Akuna and shows up implicitly at Five Rings. Set a Zetamac target (plenty of people who get offers are running 60 to 70 correct in two minutes) and hit it daily until it's boring. After that, probability and expected value: the standard prop-shop question bank, coin and dice problems, conditional probability, Bayes, and enough options intuition to explain why a market maker widens spreads when volatility rises. For the software track, drill data structures and be ready to talk about cache behavior and latency, beyond Big-O.

The trading game and the behavioral moments reward something the practice sets can't teach: composure when you're wrong in real time. Both firms deliberately put you in spots where you'll misprice something, then watch what you do next. Adjusting your quote without flinching beats defending a bad number. That's the signal they're buying, and it's why people who treat the whole loop as a math exam tend to stall at the final round even with clean arithmetic.