Software Engineer - C++, Trading Strategies
Posted Aug 24, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026
Likely interview questions for this role
Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.
About your past
Walk me through a time you had to squeeze latency out of a piece of C++ code. What was slow, how did you find out, and what did you change?
What they are checking: whether the candidate has real hands-on performance tuning experience versus theoretical knowledge
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a trader or researcher about how a strategy should be implemented. How did you handle it?
What they are checking: ability to collaborate with non-engineers who own the business logic without being dismissive or passive
Tell me about a project where you had to lead the design but also stay hands-on with the implementation. How did you split your time?
What they are checking: fit for the dual expectation of architectural leadership and detailed coding work
Describe a bug you introduced that only showed up under concurrent load. How did you track it down?
What they are checking: honesty and depth of debugging skill specifically around race conditions and concurrency
What draws you to financial markets specifically, versus just applying your C++ skills somewhere else?
What they are checking: genuine interest in trading versus generic interest in a high-paying engineering job
Tell me about a time data clearly told you your assumption about a strategy or system was wrong. What did you do next?
What they are checking: whether the candidate actually uses data to change decisions rather than just referencing it
What would you do
If a trading strategy started behaving unexpectedly in production and was losing money right now, what would you do in the next five minutes?
What they are checking: composure and decision-making priority under real financial risk and time pressure
If you were asked to add a new feature to a live trading strategy without being able to take the system down, how would you approach testing and deploying it safely?
What they are checking: judgment around risk management and testing discipline in a live production trading environment
About the work
Suppose you have a hot path that reads market data and updates an order book. What would you look at first to figure out where the time is going?
What they are checking: practical approach to profiling and performance analysis under low-latency constraints
How would you design a lock-free or low-contention structure for multiple threads updating the same price levels?
What they are checking: depth of understanding of multi-threaded and multi-core programming beyond textbook knowledge
What features in C++20 or later have you actually used in production, and what problem did they solve for you?
What they are checking: genuine currency with modern C++ versus name-dropping features from a resume
Explain how you'd design a system where a strategy needs to react to an incoming market data tick in under a microsecond. What are the tradeoffs you're making?
What they are checking: systems-level thinking about the full path from network to decision to order, including where cost is paid
How do you think about the difference between throughput and latency when you're optimizing a system, and can you give an example where they pulled in opposite directions?
What they are checking: whether the candidate actually understands tradeoffs rather than reciting that lower latency is always better
Here's a coding problem: given a stream of numbers, maintain a running median efficiently. How would you do it, and what's the complexity?
What they are checking: raw algorithmic and data structure fluency under interview pressure, mirroring the fast problem-solving the role demands
Practice this interview out loud.
Offer builds a real interview for this exact role at Akuna Capital from your resume and this job description, asks the questions one at a time, and tells you what landed. The first one is free.
Practice this out loudThe full job description
As published by Akuna Capital.