# How Susquehanna interviews traders, and why poker is the point

Source: https://www.techinterview.org/post/3233477252/how-susquehanna-interviews-traders/
Updated: 2026-08-06 · techinterview.org

Susquehanna will, at some point in the hiring process, sit you down to play poker. That isn't a personality quirk bolted onto the end of the loop. The firm runs a multi-week poker and options-theory course for every new trader class, and the game they teach maps almost one to one onto how they want you to trade. Treat the interview as a coding gauntlet and you'll prepare for the wrong thing.

SIG (short for Susquehanna International Group, based just outside Philadelphia) is one of the largest options market makers in the world, quoting bid and ask prices across a big share of US-listed equity options every day. The trader interview exists to find people who are comfortable pricing risk under uncertainty, sizing bets to that risk, and changing their mind fast when the information changes. That priority shows up in every round.

## The three tracks don't share an interview

Before you prep, figure out which loop you're actually in. The Quantitative Trader (QT) track is the game-heavy one this piece mostly covers: probability, expected value, mental math, and market-making games. Quantitative Research (QR) leans harder on statistics and probability depth with a real coding component, closer to a data-science gauntlet with derivations you have to work through. The technology and quant-dev roles look more like a systems software loop, heavy on C++, data structures, and low-latency reasoning, with far less poker and far more code. A recruiter usually tells you which bucket you're in. If they don't, ask, because the study plan for each is different.

## The SIG Quantitative Evaluation comes first

Most candidates start with the SQE, an online assessment you take before a human ever talks to you. Full-time trader candidates typically get around 17 questions in 60 minutes; interns get a shorter, tighter version closer to 20 minutes. The questions mix number sequences, logic, probability, and arithmetic you're expected to do quickly and mostly in your head.

Speed is the actual test. The problems aren't individually hard for anyone who has done competition math, but the time budget per question is tight, so what's being measured is fast, accurate mental arithmetic and pattern recognition against a clock. People who bomb it usually knew how to solve every problem and simply ran out of time. Drill mental math, percentages, fractions, quick multiplication, sequence extrapolation, until it's reflexive before you sit for this.

## Probability and expected value, out loud

Clear the SQE and the phone screens and Super Day rounds fill up with probability and EV problems. A recruiter or junior trader gives you three to five in a session and cares more about the reasoning than the final number. Classic setups show up, and so do stranger ones:

- "I roll a fair die and pay you the dollar value shown. What's a fair price to play? Now you can re-roll once if you don't like the first roll, what changes?"

- "We flip a coin until the first heads on flip *n*, and I pay you 2n dollars. What would you pay to play?"

- "Three of us each draw a card. What's the probability yours is the highest?"

- "You pay a dollar to roll a die and a six pays ten. Do you play, and how does your answer move if the payout drops to five?"

Say the setup back, write out the sample space, compute the expected value, then state whether you'd take the bet and at what price. When they change a payoff mid-problem, they're checking whether you can re-price on the fly instead of restarting from scratch. Commit to a number. A confident answer that's slightly off beats a correct one you took two minutes to whisper.

## Making a market on something you can't know

The round people remember is the market-making game. An interviewer picks some quantity nobody can look up in the room, the number of windows in the building, or the sum of the two dice they're about to roll, and asks you to quote a two-sided market: a bid and an ask. Then they trade against you. They lift your offer or hit your bid, sometimes feed you a hint, and ask for an updated market.

What they're watching is simple once you know the job. Do you set a spread wide enough to survive being picked off when you're clueless, and tighten it as you learn more? When they keep buying from you, do you notice you're probably priced too low and raise your market? Do you track your running position instead of quoting each trade in isolation? A candidate who quotes 90 bid at 110 offer on the window count, gets bought over and over, and never moves is failing the one thing the desk does for a living, which is managing adverse selection. Narrate it: you keep buying, so my market's too cheap, I'm moving it up and keeping it wide because I still don't know much.

## The poker round isn't a gimmick

Almost every trader candidate plays poker at some stage, sometimes during the Super Day, sometimes as a separate evening with a table of other candidates and a few employees. You don't need to be a strong player. They're reading whether you bet more when the odds favor you and fold when they don't, whether you size bets to your edge, whether you grasp pot odds well enough to make a call-or-fold decision against a possible bluff, and whether a bad beat knocks you off your game for the next three hands.

That last one matters more than people expect. Tilt is the poker word for letting a loss push you into worse decisions, and it's the trait that ends trading careers. Playing tight, thinking in ranges and probabilities, staying level after a loss, and adjusting to how the rest of the table plays is the whole read. If you've never played, learning basic no-limit hold'em strategy and the pot-odds math in the weeks beforehand is worth more than another stack of brainteasers.

## What the rounds are really scoring

| Stage | Format and length | What it measures | Representative task |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| SIG Quantitative Evaluation (SQE) | Online, about 17 questions in 60 minutes (shorter for interns) | Fast, accurate mental math and pattern recognition under time pressure | Extend a number sequence; quick probability and arithmetic |
| Phone screen | 30 to 45 minutes with a recruiter or junior trader | Probability and EV reasoning, plus why trading and why SIG | "What would you pay to roll a die for its dollar value?" |
| Probability and brainteaser rounds | Several Super Day rounds, three to five problems each | Structured reasoning, calibration, willingness to commit to a number | Coin, dice, and card EV problems with mid-problem twists |
| Market-making game | Live, one interviewer trading against you | Spread setting, inventory awareness, updating on order flow, adverse selection | Quote a two-sided market on an unknown count, then re-quote as they trade |
| Poker | Super Day or a separate evening session | Bet sizing to edge, pot-odds decisions, emotional control after a loss | No-limit hold'em against candidates and employees |
| Behavioral | Short, folded into other rounds | Genuine interest in markets, coachability, team fit | "Walk me through a decision you made with incomplete information" |

## Comp, and how to read the number

New-grad trader packages at the top options market makers run high, and SIG sits in that tier alongside firms like Optiver and Jane Street. Expect a base salary that competes with the other Chicago and New York prop shops, a signing bonus, and a year-end discretionary bonus that in a strong year can be a large multiple of base. The bonus is where the variance lives, and it's tied to desk and firm performance, so the first-year total-comp figures floating around online can mislead in both directions. Rather than anchor on one number, pull current data from levels.fyi and recent Wall Street Oasis and Blind threads for your exact role and class year, and treat any single reported figure as one data point. When an offer comes, ask directly how the bonus is structured and what a typical first-year and third-year trader actually saw.

## Prepping for the six weeks you probably have

If your loop is the trader track, weight your time toward what's hard to fake. Mental math first, because the SQE gates everything and it's pure reps. Then a probability book worked with pen and paper; Xinfeng Zhou's *A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews* (the green book) covers most of what SIG asks, and *Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability* covers much of the rest. Practice the market-making game with a friend who feeds you order flow and lies to you a little, because reading your own fills is a skill no textbook gives you. Learn enough poker to play tight and think in pot odds. Skip the LeetCode grind unless you're on the tech or QR track, where clean C++ and algorithmic fluency carry real weight and the games mostly disappear. What the firm wants to find out is whether you'll make good decisions with money at stake and bad information in front of you, so the strongest prep is putting yourself in that spot over and over before they do.