The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at DRW in Mar 2018
Interview
difficult take home assignment followed by a techical phone screen.
i was told they have several openings from the application team to the infrastructure team and if a team feel i was a fit the team will give me a phone screen. the infrastructure team finally do the phone screen with me, which is weird since i don’t have too much experience on that area.
the phone screen includes tons of very low level jvm questions like how does jvm store the objects in memory, how is tree map implemented and how does two threads exchange data.
i learned those concept from school, but my daily work is building web platform which never involved such low level knowledges so i never thought they’re going to asking that kind of questions.
baiscally i interviewed a position which doesn’t match my background. not sure why that team decide to call me since they should know my background from my resume.
Leetcode like question with follow ups on c++ concepts like virtual memory, address space, etc. Coding everything from scratch and there’re also weird concepts like function pointer. Question was not too hard but need to remember concepts and syntax clearly
HR, take home coding tests, behavioral, technical discussion, live codings for several rounds.
The live codings are a bit hard. Some are about problems solving, some are about data structure and algorithms.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at DRW (London, England) in Aug 2025
Interview
Did a set of interviews in summer 25. The interviews were not that difficult, mostly problems you'll face in real life. The interviewers themselves were mostly nice, although a couple seemed like they didn't care, not very involved in the process.
Got rejected due to 2 sections having "mixed signals": one generic "not deep enough", the other didn't like the approach to solving a problem (it was solved on time anyway). Funnily enough, got praised for using the same approach in other section. Mixed signals also came from the people who wouldn't have been on the same team.
It would be nice if interviewers were aligned on evaluation criteria, otherwise it becomes a guessing game.
Other that that it was a positive experience and the rejection was delivered by phone, not a generic email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some very down-to-earth problem on coding section, pleasantly surprised.
Unfamiliar algo problem, more like medium-hard.
And a data modelling exercise.
