Susquehanna Interview Process: CodeSignal to Super Day

Susquehanna International Group runs two completely different interviews under one name, and almost every "SIG interview" article on the internet blurs them together. The famous one is the quantitative trader track: probability puzzles, expected-value games, make-a-market drills with cards and dice, mental math at speed. It is not a coding interview at all. The other track, the one this guide covers, is for software engineers and quantitative developers, and it is a genuine coding loop that opens with a CodeSignal assessment and ends at a Super Day. If you are prepping for the trader track, most of this guide is the wrong preparation, and the section below tells you plainly where to go instead.

The SWE track has a distinctive shape worth internalizing before you prep. The coding sits easy-to-medium and rewards picking the right data structure and implementing a stateful system correctly. A small set of problems recurs across candidates rather than a firehose of random puzzles. The live technical round frequently hands you existing code, often a slow linear search, and asks you to make it fast, which is closer to real engineering than a blank whiteboard. And because SIG is privately held, there is no public stock to grow into; the offer is high base plus a cash bonus and a sign-on. Prepare for that loop. A generic guide preps you for a different one.

Two Tracks, One Name

The single most important thing to get right about SIG is which pipeline you are in, because the two share almost nothing.

The Shape of the SWE Loop

A handful of numbers anchor the engineering loop. Hold these before we walk it stage by stage. Counts vary with role and year, so treat them as the reported center of the range.

• The assessment: ~4 Q / 70 min. The coding gate is a CodeSignal General Coding Assessment, reported around four questions in seventy minutes for full-time SWE roles, difficulty easy to medium with no hard problems. Internship versions have been smaller, around two questions in sixty minutes.
• Technical rounds: 1 to 2. Live coding in a shared editor with one or two engineers, roughly 60 to 90 minutes each, in C++ or Python. One report describes a ninety-minute open-notebook round. A strong candidate can be sent straight to the final loop, so the count is not a pass-fail signal.
• Super Day: 3 to 4 sessions. The final loop is a run of back-to-back sessions of more coding, design and optimization, and a resume-and-fit conversation. SIG-wide these can reach four to six; the SWE loop is usually three to four. Held at a SIG office or virtually.
• End to end: 2 to 4 weeks. Most SWE loops run about two to four weeks, with roughly a week between stages and an offer landing one to two weeks after the final. Some stretch toward eight weeks depending on team and scheduling.

The Process, Step by Step

The path is consistent across engineering reports. It opens with a recruiter screen, runs through the CodeSignal assessment as the first real gate, moves into one or two live technical rounds, and lands at a Super Day. The pace is brisk for a private firm, usually a couple of weeks for the whole thing.

A word on the coding, because it is where SIG differs most from a FAANG loop. The problems that recur are practical data-structure builds, not algorithm tricks. The one reported most often is a range-and-category lookup store, framed as a movie database. Objects carry a name, genre, and year, and you build a class that fetches by genre and by year range in roughly constant time. Candidates over-reach for segment trees; the interviewer wants hashmap indexing and bucketing. Alongside it appear a lazy-update hashmap with global offsets and a trie that scans a headline for company tickers. Stateful OOP builds show up too, like a Battleship-style grid simulation or a Premium question that prints a receipt. The instruction is almost always "implement this system correctly," not "find the clever optimum."

The Susquehanna angle

Prepare for the loop SIG runs. Three things set the engineering track apart. First, the coding is easy-to-medium and data-structure-driven, so the win is choosing a hashmap or a trie and implementing a stateful system correctly. Skip the hard-DP grind. Second, the live round often optimizes existing code, a naive linear search turned into an indexed lookup, which almost nobody drills for. Third, the offer is a private-firm cash package, high base plus bonus and sign-on with no public equity, so the negotiation is different too. Drill SIG's concentrated problem set and treat the fit conversation as a real conversation.

Levels and a Private-Firm Offer

SIG's engineering ladder runs Associate Software Engineer at entry, then Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, and Technical Lead. The single most important comp fact is that SIG is privately held, so there is essentially no RSU or public stock in the package. Where a FAANG offer leans on equity that can grow, a SIG offer is a high base plus a cash bonus plus a sign-on, which changes what you can negotiate. The variable lever is the bonus and the sign-on, not a stock grant.

• Associate SWE: ~$148K. Entry level. Roughly $134K base plus a cash bonus around $14K; no meaningful stock. Approximate US medians.
• Software Engineer: ~$204K. Roughly $172K base with a cash bonus near $31K. A median sign-on of about $20K is commonly reported.
• Senior SWE: ~$237K. Roughly $195K base plus a cash bonus around $42K, and again no public equity component.
• Technical Lead: ~$290K. Roughly $214K base with a cash bonus near $76K. Figures are approximate US medians and drift over time.

SIG hires engineers across offices in the US, Dublin, London, Hong Kong, and Sydney, and figures vary by region. A Dublin quant-developer package, for example, has been reported around €125K base plus a €25K sign-on. Verify your own region and level before you anchor on a number. The offer lesson covers the cash-heavy, no-equity shape in detail and where you have room to push.

What SIG Reads For

The engineering behavioral round is a resume-and-fit conversation. Bring real stories you can talk through, and leave the memorized rubric at home. SIG publishes its values as unnumbered themes, not a numbered principles list, and inventing a count would be a fabrication. The themes it states are collaboration over the lone genius, curiosity and questioning your assumptions, individual impact, and dependability and honesty. Layered on top is the culture the firm advertises everywhere: intellectual honesty, thinking clearly under uncertainty, and a competitive, gaming streak. The strongest fit answers reason honestly about what you did versus what the team did, and show you can change your mind when the evidence changes.

What This Guide Covers

The rest of the guide takes each round apart and turns it into concrete preparation for the software-engineer and quant-developer track. Start wherever your own loop looks thinnest.

Common questions