Hudson River Trading hires 0.1% of applicants for its $70k New York internship. How do you get in?

Hudson River Trading is, according to Levels.fyi, the highest paying company in the world for graduate software engineers, paying $400k on average. The best way to become one is by converting an internship, but those are not easy to come by.

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A recent video from education YouTuber Gohar Khan featured Christina Song, one of HRT's campus recruiting team. She said the firm accepted just ~20 interns for its engineering program in New York despite receiving an estimated "15,000, maybe 20,000 applications." At the higher end, this would give the firm an acceptance rate of just 0.1%, lower than hedge funds like Balyasny and private equity firms like Blackstone.

HRT is rightfully selective with who it hires given the ludicrous sums these interns are paid. Song said that, as per HRT's public job listings, interns earn a $25k signing bonus and are paid $5.8k per week. An eight week programme would pay $71.4k.

How do you stand out when applying to Hudson River Trading? Song said that the best candidates "wow us in their technical interviews" for both coding and data analysis. She said the firm also has a "high appreciation for students with a lot of ambition;" ways of demonstrating that are "taking all of the hardest courses on campus" or "div[ing] deep into personal projects." 

Insiders have told us HRT is one of a group of trading firms that "see the markets as a data science problem to solve and are very scientific in their approach." Optimizing your studies and application with this in mind will give you the best chance of succeeding; Jennifer Wang, a graduate algo dev at HRT said in the video that it's better to pick courses “where you are pushing and challenging your brain on hard problems… rather than gearing up towards very specific domain knowledge.”

Working knowledge of both Python and C++ is also vital. HRT engineer Joe Smith said last year that the firm has two broad engineering teams ('Trading Tech' and 'Research & Development') which use the languages to different degrees. He said Trading Tech is roughly "70% C++ and 30% python... Research & Development is roughly 70% python and 30% C++."

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