My name is Andrei Smirdin, and I am a fourth-year student at HSE University in St. Petersburg. I have always been interested in economics and enjoyed keeping up with financial news. When it came time to look for my next summer internship, I decided to try to get into one of the companies engaged in trading on the stock exchange. Luck smiled on me: I spent 10 weeks at the London office of the trading company Jump Trading. In this post, I want to share what I did during the internship and why I decided to pursue finance once again, but this time as a trader.
(Photo from the company's page on )
About Me
In the third year, students of "Applied Mathematics and Computer Science" usually choose one of three tracks: Machine Learning, Software Engineering, or Programming Languages. I couldn't decide on which direction I wanted to study, so for my elective courses, I attended subjects related to both Software Engineering and Machine Learning.
After my second year, I went to Moscow for an internship at Yandex, and after my third year, I set myself the goal of going abroad for an internship.
Searching for an Internship
Considering my interest in finance, I applied not only to giant firms (which everyone tries to get into) but also paid special attention to traders. Since the beginning of September, I had been reviewing lists of companies in aggregator tables like and sending applications if I found the company interesting. Additionally, I checked new job postings on LinkedIn, filtering them by locations I was interested in.
The results did not take long to arrive: my first interview invitation came from Jump Trading, which I applied to through LinkedIn, having no idea what the firm was about. To my surprise, there was very little information about it online, which made me quite cautious. However, I learned that Jump Trading has been in business for 20 years and has offices in all major financial centers around the world. This reassured me; I concluded that the company is serious.
I found the interviews quite easy. First, there was a short phone interview with questions about basic networking and C++. After that, I had three video interviews with more interesting questions. It seemed like the interviewers were trying to evaluate how good I am as a programmer rather than how well I can think, as many other companies do.
As a result, in mid-November, I received my first offer! At the same time, I was interviewing with five other companies. For various reasons, if successful, there would be a wait of up to a month before an offer, while Jump didn’t want to wait. I decided that I would have the opportunity to gain experience that my acquaintances do not have, and I accepted the offer in London. Later, I also received an offer from Facebook and an invitation for a host-matching from Google (which almost means an offer).
Expectations and Reality
Before the internship, I had concerns that I would have to work non-stop from 8 to 5 (these hours were in my contract); that there would be no lunches in the office and I would have to find somewhere to eat either very expensively or unappetizingly; that there would be very few interns, and I would have no one to communicate with; and that there would be no interesting events for interns. In the end, the only truth to all this was the workday, which indeed started at 8 am. However, as I learned, this is standard practice for trading companies and is related to stock exchange hours. The office provided free good lunches. There were 20 other interns aside from me, and on the first day, we were given a calendar of events planned for the duration of our internship. As a result, I went karting, had dinner with one of the founders of the company, took a boat ride on the Thames, visited the Science Museum, played something like a quiz game, and during the first week, I played a game that resembled 'Running City' the most.
Another important characteristic of financial firms is the location of their offices. If you travel to London, you are highly likely to work in the City of London — the business center of London and all of Europe. Jump Trading’s office is located in the heart of the city, and from the windows, you can see one of the buildings well-known to you from English textbooks. In my case, that building was St. Paul's Cathedral.
(view from the office windows)
In addition to the salary, the company provided accommodation within walking distance of the office. This is really great because housing in central London is quite an expensive luxury.
Internship Tasks
All interns at the company can be divided into developers and traders. Essentially, the former support the latter, making it as convenient as possible for them to implement trading strategies. I was one of the developers.
I was part of the team responsible for transferring all information between Jump and various exchanges. During my internship, I had one major project, which involved testing the connection to the exchanges: I needed to verify that everything worked correctly in non-standard situations, for example, if the exchange duplicated a message multiple times. We met every week with my direct supervisor to discuss all non-urgent technical matters. I also had weekly meetings with the team leader, during which we discussed my impressions of the internship. In the end, I completed my project even a bit earlier than planned, gained invaluable experience writing production code in C++, and gained a much deeper understanding of network protocols (not surprisingly, I was asked about this in the interview, and it really came in handy).
(Photo from the company's page on )
What's next?
Despite the interesting tasks, during the internship, I realized that I would like to try myself as a trader, not just a developer. I mentioned this during the discussion of my adaptation in the company. It would have been inappropriate to abandon an already started project, so I was offered to come for another internship, but in a different role.
It turned out that for this, I had to go through the interview process again, because traders are tested for completely different skills. However, I was told that they would only check how well I knew mathematics since my programming skills had already been well assessed in the summer. The math interviews were a bit more challenging for me than the programming ones, but I handled them well and next summer I will try something entirely new.
Source: habr.com
