About Jump Trading
Jump Trading is a Chicago-based proprietary trading firm that operates one of the world's most sophisticated low-latency infrastructures. Jump trades almost every electronically liquid asset class — equities, futures, options, FX, fixed income, and crypto — and is structured as small autonomous trading desks with deep technology investment. Notable arms include Jump Crypto and Jump Capital.
For current openings see our Jump Trading listings.
Interview Process
- Resume screen: heavy emphasis on top-tier school + competitive math/CS background (USAMO, IOI, ICPC, Putnam)
- Online assessment: hard timed test with probability, math, and coding sections
- Phone interviews: two technical rounds with traders or engineers
- On-site: typically a full day in Chicago or NYC; can include a market-making game and a technical project discussion
Mathematics and Probability
Jump leans heavily on competition-style math. Expect:
- Combinatorics and clever counting problems
- Markov chains and stationary distributions
- Brain-teasers that reward an "aha" insight rather than mechanical computation
- Coin-flipping puzzles with adversarial structure
Practice problems from Putnam and from quant-finance interview compilations. The bar is closer to a math olympiad than to a typical buy-side puzzle book.
Coding
Jump tests coding in C++ for engineering roles and Python for trader roles. Algorithms are real — graph problems, dynamic programming, segment trees — but interviewers care more about how you reason about edge cases and complexity than about whether you remember a textbook trick.
Trading and Markets
For quant trader candidates, Jump runs a trading game similar to SIG's: a multi-round market-making exercise with hidden information, where you have to set bid-ask quotes and update them as new trades arrive. Practice this format — it's distinctive enough that unprepared candidates struggle.
Behavioral
Jump's culture leans intense and engineering-driven. Expect questions about how you handled ambiguity, how you debug a hard problem, and what you've built independently. Mentioning open-source contributions or self-driven research projects helps a lot.
How to Prepare
- Work through a competition-math problem book (e.g., Engel's Problem-Solving Strategies)
- Drill C++ if you're applying to engineering — Jump runs a deep C++ stack
- Build something measurable — a trading-bot backtest, a data pipeline, a perf benchmark — that you can talk about
- Practice market-making games on our resources page