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Virtu Financial

Large Enterprises

Virtu Financial is a leading electronic market maker and provider of financial services, offering liquidity across a wide range of asset classes including equities, fixed income, currencies, and commodities. The firm is known for its high-frequency trading technology and its execution services for institutional clients worldwide.

7 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Virtu Financial·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Virtu Financial and got hit with a probability puzzle that looked deceptively clean on the surface. The green ball mechanic is what trips you up if you're not careful.
  • You have a bag with 5 red, 5 blue, and 5 green balls. You draw one ball at a time without replacement, except green balls get returned to the bag after each draw. You keep red and blue balls. Once you're holding 3 balls, what's the probability that at least 2 of them are red? Follow-up: same setup but now there are 10 red balls instead of 5. How does that change the answer?

“The green ball return mechanic is where I got tangled.”

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Virtu Financial·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Coding round at Virtu Financial for a software engineer position. One question, bracket validation, pretty standard stuff but the details matter more than you'd think.
  • Given an array of strings where each string consists only of bracket characters like '(', '[', '{', ')', ']', '}', determine whether each string is valid.

“Classic stack problem.”

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Virtu Financial·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Round 1 for a Quant Researcher role at Virtu Financial was a full ML system design problem centered on basketball shot prediction. The interviewer pushed into model architecture, feature engineering, and some surprisingly tricky stats territory toward the end.
  • Given the information available at the moment a basketball is shot, how would you build a model to predict whether it goes in?
  • In linear regression, if you regress the outcome on a single feature individually and it comes back statistically insignificant, can you just drop that feature from your model?

“Open-ended enough that you have to do some work just to frame it properly.”

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Virtu Financial·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Virtu Financial coding round, one algorithmic problem about bit manipulation. Pretty niche problem space, felt like it was testing whether you'd seen this type of thing before rather than raw problem-solving.
  • You're given an array of integers. You can flip any single bit of any number in one operation. What's the minimum number of operations needed to make all elements in the array equal?

“My first instinct was to think about XOR between pairs, which got me partway there.”

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Virtu Financial·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Got a coding question at Virtu Financial for a software engineer role. Pretty algorithmic, the kind of problem that looks clean on the surface but has a few edge cases that'll trip you up if you're not careful.
  • You're given two integer arrays. You can replace any contiguous subarray with a single value equal to its sum. What's the minimum total length both arrays can be reduced to while still being identical? Return -1 if it's not possible.

“Took me a minute to even parse what 'identical' meant here since you're collapsing subarrays from both sides simultaneously.”

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Virtu Financial·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Virtu Financial coding round with a string manipulation problem that sounds deceptively clean but has some tricky edge cases once you start thinking about it carefully.
  • Given a binary string, an integer m, and an integer k, where the string cannot contain m consecutive 0s, find the minimum number of operations to satisfy this constraint. Each operation lets you flip k consecutive positions to 1.

“Took me a minute to even parse what was being asked.”

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Virtu Financial·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Virtu Financial data scientist interview with some pretty gnarly probability questions. The urn problem showed up and it was more involved than it looked on the surface, especially the second part where they change the ball counts and want both an intuitive guess and the exact math.
  • An urn has 5 red, 5 blue, and 5 green balls. You draw one at a time uniformly at random. Green balls go back immediately; red and blue are kept. You stop when you're holding 3 balls. What's the probability that at least two of the three kept balls are red?
  • Now the urn has 10 red, 5 blue, and 5 green balls, same process. Give an intuitive estimate first, then compute the exact probability that at least two of the three held balls are red.

“The green ball mechanic is a bit of a distraction.”

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