2026 Citadel Internship Timeline

Posting this because I see people asking questions about the process. If you have any questions, feel free to put it in the comments, and please don't DM. I can't provide my resume or specific intervi

Posting this because I see people asking questions about the process. If you have any questions, feel free to put it in the comments, and please don't DM. I can't provide my resume or specific interview questions. Background - Freshman intern at Millennium as "quant dev" but mostly SWE - Sophomore intern at Google doing ML systems work, not Deepmind - T20 but a non-target - Definitely no recruiter presence from quant here and have rarely seen people get into quant. - US Citizen Preparation - Leetcode. Tagged + Medium/Hard questions, no codeforces. No extreme hard questions, but heavy on DP, graphs (don't forget Union-Find!). I think around 500 solved? But I've been on and off on it for the last 3 years. Grinded for three weeks leading up to the interview. - Some systems. I was pretty brushed up on it from my internship. - Behavioral. I think being a sociable person and four or five stories helps. You won't believe the state of some of the CS majors out there - A little bit of C++ trivia. Some firms ask this and I've heard it being asked for Citadel, but I've never been asked this. Still fun to learn. - Random trivia. Watch some Fireship and you can yap about this pretty easily, like what a DNS is, how compilers/lexers work, etc. Process - Applied: 2025, Oct 3rd. I think Citadel + CitSec have the same application portal so you only need to apply once - Received OA: 2025, Oct 3rd. I didn't do so hot on the second question. Harder on the LC, definitely did not get a 100 on the second one. I've heard of people being able to skip this entirely. - First Round Email: 2025, Oct 6th. Recruiter emailed back saying they'll be moving forward with the first round. Scheduled it and got a confirmation a few days later. Scheduled it way back because I had exams and wanted to grind LC. - First Round: 2025, Oct 21st. Technical first round. Heard back two days later saying I passed and to schedule second round/superday. Scheduled it pretty close because I was worried HC was approaching. - Superday: 2025, Oct 27th. Three back-to-back interviews. Mostly all technical, some behavioral + resume. Heard back two days later about passing and to schedule leadership calls - Leadership Calls: Late October to Early November. Interviewed with a few managers across Citadel and Citadel Securities, some mix of technical and behavioral questions. I'd say it was pretty chill, great way to learn about teams and what would fit you the most. - Offer: Few days later after all the leadership calls, Got offers for Citadel and Citadel Securities, chose Citadel because I liked the team and the manager. I heard for Citadel Securities you get an offer then team matched, whereas for Citadel it's an offer for a team (GQS, EQR, etc.). Got it wrapped up around a month. I had competing offers and I did pester the recruiters a little bit, but they were responsive. Can't say it's been the same for some of my other friends that got processes, but they seem to be relatively more responsive. Thoughts - I don't have much experience with big tech (even with Google I get screened at most places), but found quant recruiters are more liberal at giving interviews if you have previous experience at other firms. They're also significantly more responsive, or maybe I've just been lucky - I got rejected a year prior with Millennium while my friend who had no internships but a better GPA got interviews, so it might truly be RNG or they care about GPA - People I've met were nice but intense at times. Varying degrees of interview difficulty, from medium-mediums to medium-hards. Tagged questions did help but they seem to have their own twists on them, so best understand what's actually going on. I just grinded DP + Graph + Design questions - For behavioral, I did not do STAR, at least not intentionally. Don't say incomprehensible drivel but sounding genuine helps a lot, I think. - Basic format for all the technicals was 5 minutes of intro, ~35 minutes of Coderpad (mostly LC), and 5 minutes of questions. - I did not get a complete 100% on all questions. For my last superday round, the interviewer had four follow-ups and the code was reaching ~250 lines of code, at which point time ran out. Still passed though. Typing fast helped. It varies wildly across interviewers - some had preset test cases, some had an empty file and asked you to write tests. - One video I did watch which has semi-generic advice but still kinda helpful for timelines is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzxLDZs2Csk. Note that I'm not the guy in the video but I think it's good general advice.