So, we took 13th place out of 142 teams at ICPC SWERC in Lyon last weekend. Top 10% – pretty solid. But honestly? We didn’t go for the trophy.
We went to watch. To meet the kind of people who could solve impossible problems under real pressure. That’s exactly what we do here every day at Alber Blanc.
In a normal tech interview, they at least give you some time to think. SWERC has 5 hours, 12 problems, a live scoreboard, and no help. It’s the purest pressure, where you debug on the clock, you trust your team, and you adapt when things go wrong.
That’s not just a competition, that’s a live audition for high-frequency trading.
The mindset you need there – optimizing under constraints, managing state, making quick decisions with imperfect information – is the same thinking that drives our trading systems. ICPC scoreboard updates every few minutes. In HFT, trading decisions can be made and changed in microseconds, but the pressure is the same. It’s identical.
That’s why we are so invested in these events. Because, while interviews tell you a lot about a person, they don’t tell you how they handle a ticking clock and stakes. ICPC does.
If you’ve done it before, you already get it. Algorithmic thinking is king. It’s all about performing under pressure, right? You’ve lived it.
If you enjoy solving hard problems under pressure, and see a bad submission as a puzzle rather than a personal failure, we are probably talking the same language.
We’re looking for engineers and quants who think like that – clearly, calmly and uncompromisingly. People who’d rather solve the problem than just talk about it.
We’ll next see you at NWERC in Karlsruhe, and at several other regionals. Feel free to stop by our booth, see our careers page, or send us a message on LinkedIn!
