Optiver Quantitative Finance Internship Online Test: First Round Coding Questions
Interview Experience
3 coding questions, 1.5 hours The following content requires a score higher than 200. You can already view it. Q1: Given n, k, m; n is the number of shares you want to hold, k is the number of shares
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3 coding questions, 1.5 hours The following content requires a score higher than 200. You can already view it. Q1: Given n, k, m; n is the number of shares you want to hold, k is the number of shares you already hold, and m is the number of times you can buy and sell 1 share. Calculate the maximum number of different ways to convert k shares to n shares.
Example: You have 1 share and want to convert it to 2 shares. You are allowed 3 buy/sell operations: 1. buy 2. buy buy sell 3. buy sell buy 4. sell buy buy (four ways in total). Q2: You have N stock weights called allocations, which are arrays of N numbers. You also have T days' worth of price data for N stocks, which is an N*T array of timesseries. You need to keep the weights as specified by allocations each day. How do you calculate the average daily log return and standard deviation over T days? Q3: Stock prices follow a uniform distribution [a, b]. You have k opportunities to buy stocks at price p. You need to buy n stocks. What is the expected cost of your stock purchases in the optimal scenario?
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a optiver interview for a quant role (intern level) during the oa round reported in 2026.
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About Optiver Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Optiver. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Optiver are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Optiver interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Optiver reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Optiver Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Optiver reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.