Optiver Internship
09 Jan 2026Hello ! I am Raadhes Chandaluru, a Btech student at IIT Madras. A Quant Finance internship is one of the most sought after internships among undergraduate students in engineering and mathematics. I had the amazing opportunity to intern at Optiver as a Quantitative Trading Intern during the summer of 2025. Through this blog post, I would like to share my experience and other fun stuff I did during and after the internship.
Please ignore the below. I am yet to finish this blog.
First of all how'd they select us? It was open for 2026 undergrads in Math, CS and electrical engineering students. They sent out a flyer to our placement cell which contained a link to a google form. The form had questions about our GPA, coding experience (leetcode/codechef/codeforces and GitHub), past achievements in math, cs and statistics and why we were interested in applying. After that they shortlisted some folks for the online assessments: a math test and a coding test. The math test had questions on probability, combinatorics and some puzzles. The coding test was a series of simple implementation problems.
I was delighted when I received a mail informing me that I was selected to participate in the program and to confirm my attendance. JS shared some pre-work material for software engineering and trading. The software engineering pre-work involved learning about OCaml's syntax and some basic exercises to make our foundations solid. The trading work prep material was basically a python basics, numpy and pandas crash course.
The great thing about Hong Kong is that it has this great PAR (pre-arrival registration) system which allows you to skip applying for a long visa process. You just need to apply for a PAR online which is automatically approved immediately by the system. You can use the PAR to stay for a short duration in HK without a visa. Some of us had our PAR rejected by the system so we had to quickly apply for a visa or retry the PAR application.
JS was very generous to sponsor our travel and stay in HK. They booked our flights, airport tranfer cabs at HK and arranged for accommodation in a nearby hotel (The Jervois for me and some of my friends). They also provided us with a per diem allowance via a gift card to cover our food and other expenses during the program as well as an Octopus card for local transportation.
The main program spanned over 8 days (5 business and 3 weekend days) from 13th Dec to 19th Dec 2023. My flight from Hyderabad was through kuala lumpur on Malaysian Airlines and I reached HK in the afternoon of 12th December. Unfortunately my luggage got delayed and I had to wait for it to get delivered to the hotel until the next day. I was very sleepy because the travel was during the night however I decided to attend the networking dinner on the night at a great Italian restaurant (BACI Trattoria & Bar). I met the other participants, the HRs and some employees like Pranav Goyal (Yeah, the AIR 1 guy from a few years ago) and Pradipta Bora. I had informed one of the HRs about my luggage being delayed and they gave me 2 JS t-shirts to wear! After the dinner me and my friends went across the bay to the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade to see the skyline of HK at night which was beautiful.
I had never stayed at a good hotel in my life. So the experience of staying at The Jervois was surreal. The rooms were spacious and well-furnished although I never got used to the room because I was outside for all of my awake time. The office was a short walk from the hotel, we would try to leave at 8:30am, reaching the office around 8:45am, and finishing breakfast by 9 when they would begin the training. Though I do remember them saying it was alright to keep eating for a bit after 9am if we were not done. The HRs also arranged Indian meals for us at breakfast and lunch in the office which was very thoughtful of them. I remember eating poori, poha, pav bhaji and paneer butter masala on various days. I never missed Indian food during my stay.
Day 1: We began with an introduction to OCaml by some Jane Street engineers. We were separated into groups of five and assigned teaching assistants who were full-time software engineers at Jane Street. They helped us with our doubts and queries during the coding sessions. After lunch we were taught the basics of good coding practices with reference to our exercises (which were an extension of our pre-work material).
At the end of the day we were guided to the Chutney Tandoor House which we somehow reached without going to the street through buildings. The HRs had arranged a trip to watch horse races after dinner, however I bowed out since I did not get enough sleep on the flight and last night.
Day 2: We were introduced to the async library in the morning followed by pair programming with another participant to finish some exercises. Async was pretty hard to understand and I'm not sure whether I ever completely got it. At the end of day we had a race across hong kong to find clues and complete tasks after which we had dinner at Lokcha.
Day 3: The exercises were all basically pieces of building a snake game in OCaml. We were allowed to showcase our games with our unique features before lunch. I added a feature to change the speed of the snake based on a powerup and changed the points scored for apples eaten based on the time taken to eat them.
Post-lunch the trading and research part of the program began. We began with reviewing the jupyter notebooks shared in the pre-work material. We were given a dataset of historical stock prices and asked to come up predictions for the spread of a stock based on its historical prices using statistical methods. The day ended with a chip trading game which resembled trading and market making.
JS gave us a free evening today. We used this opportunity to go shopping across the bay in Tsim Sha Tsui. I bought a few souvenirs for my family and friends.
Weekend (Saturday): We were given a choice to either go to Disneyland or Ocean Park. We chose Ocean Park (I already went to disneyland in the US so I voted for Ocean Park). From amusement rides to animal shows to aquariums, Ocean Park had it all. We had a great time there.
Weekend (Sunday): Lunch was arranged at Rajastan Rifles near the peak (Mountain overlooking hong kong). Most of the participants hiked up the peak but I decided to wake up late and came by tram. The view from the peak was breathtaking. After lunch we went up the peak tower for the breathtaking view. There was a small shop up in the tower where we bought some candies.
Day 4 and 5: We continued modelling on both the days. We played Figgie and Estimathon at the day end. On the fourth day we were taken out for VR games as well. I also had to finish using the remaining accumulated money in the cards so I bought a Zara blazer, a samsung tablet, some snacks for home and some gifts for family and friends.
Thanks to my friends Aditya Jain, Shreyas Bargale, Harsh Vardhan Daga, Dev Mehta and Lakshya Rani for making the experience memorable. Thanks to Jane Street, Isha Prabhakar, Steven (or Stephen? - my swe mentor) and others for the program !
Last year a lot of similar programs targeting IIT students were also started by competing firms such as Optiver's FutureFocus in Mumbai, IMC's launchpad in Mumbai, HRT's Explore HRT, Jump's India Bootcamp (you might not find this online, it was publicized through clubs at IIT Madras) and Citadel's Discover India
