How to Pass the All Options Software Engineer Interview in 2026

The All Options DNA (TL;DR)

From Amsterdam and Austin, the All Options Proprietary trading desk evaluates rapid mental math, risk tolerance, and low-latency system design. Interviewers look for candidates naming the trade-off you rejected when optimizing execution speed.

Interviews inC++Python

The All Options Interview Loop

Your onsite loop will typically consist of 5 rounds.

1
Round 1
Recruiter Screen
Motivation, role fit, logistics.
2
Round 2
Coding Screen
LeetCode-medium algorithmic problems under time pressure.
3
Round 3
System Design
Distributed systems, trade-offs at scale, architecture under constraints.
4
Round 4
Onsite Coding
LeetCode-hard, debugging, code clarity, edge cases.
5
Round 5
Behavioral / Leadership
Past evidence of ownership, influence, resolving conflict.

The Danger Zone: Top Reasons Candidates Fail

Based on our database of All Options interview outcomes, avoid these common traps:

Using a nested loop resulting in O(n squared) complexity
Neglecting to handle concurrent access to the order map
Loading the entire file into memory
Using an inefficient sorting algorithm for the final output

Test Yourself: Real All Options Questions

Three real prompts pulled from our database.

Type · motivation

Why are you interested in moving from general software development to the high-frequency trading and market-making space at All Options?

Type · architecture

Design a distributed system for monitoring the health of multiple trading nodes across different data centers.

Type · algorithm

Implement a thread-safe order book that supports adding orders and canceling orders by ID.

+ many more questions, signals, and worked examples

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All Options Interview Question Bank

A sample from our database, grouped by round. Sign up to see the full set.

9 of 12 questions shown

Recruiter Screen

1
Type · motivation
Why are you interested in moving from general software development to the high-frequency trading and market-making space at All Options?

Coding Screen

2
Type · algorithm
Given a stream of trade prices, implement a function that returns the moving average of the last N prices with O(1) time complexity per update.
3
Type · algorithm
Find the maximum profit that can be made by buying and selling a stock once, given an array of prices where prices[i] is the price on day i.
+ 1 more questions in this round (sign up to unlock)

System Design

4
Type · architecture
Design a low-latency price feed handler that consumes UDP multicast data and updates an internal state.
5
Type · architecture
How would you design a system to log millions of trade events per second for regulatory reporting without impacting the trading engine's latency?
+ 1 more questions in this round (sign up to unlock)

Onsite Coding

6
Type · algorithm
Given a large binary file of trade records, write a memory-efficient parser to extract the top 10 most active symbols.
7
Type · debugging
You are given a piece of C++ code that exhibits intermittent memory corruption under high load. How do you find and fix it?
+ 1 more questions in this round (sign up to unlock)

Behavioral / Leadership

8
Type · ownership
Describe a time you identified a performance bottleneck in a production system. What steps did you take to resolve it?
9
Type · conflict
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer on a technical architectural decision. How did you handle it?