Citadel launches record intern class, even as AI looms

Citadel launches – Citadel and Citadel Securities kicked off their biggest intern class yet in Palm Beach on Monday—more than 350 interns selected from over 115,900 applicants. Even as anxiety grows over how AI will reshape entry-level hiring, the firms say they’re not “headcoun

On Monday morning in Palm Beach, interns for Citadel and Citadel Securities started a program the firms describe as their biggest bet yet on entry-level talent.

More than 350 interns—drawn from Citadel and its sister firm, market maker Citadel Securities—began an offsite designed to bring new recruits into the day-to-day reality of quantitative finance and trading. The class is the largest global cohort the companies have assembled to date.

They did it with a selection process that is both highly selective and, by the firms’ own account, getting wider. Citadel and Citadel Securities accepted just 0.36% of applicants out of more than 115,900 submissions, an increase of 6.4% from last year’s record.

“This business has seen how valuable campus talent can be,” Iris Wang, who oversees campus recruitment at Citadel, said. She added the firms are not “headcount-restrained.”

That message arrives as AI has sparked widespread anxiety about what it may do to entry-level hiring. Citadel’s commitment is not entirely surprising. given how competitive hedge funds have become for talent they can put to work in the face of enormous capital. In recent years, top hedge funds have been building campus pipelines that can rival the big banks’ storied internship programs.

Other firms are moving too. Millennium plans to start an investing internship in 2027, and Balyasny is launching a nine-month Catalyst training program for recent graduates.

The firms say their recruiting pitch has sharpened rather than softened. Wang and Fabian Figi. who leads recruiting at Citadel Securities. said roles in quantitative finance are especially attractive to young people because they combine cutting-edge technology and AI—and because they can look like a durable long-term bet in a workforce that is changing fast.

Wang and Figi also pointed to the talent competition from outside the hedge-fund world: some AI labs have tried to poach top quants from hedge funds and trading firms, at times offering multimillion-dollar pay packages.

Still, the internship pay and support package is built for students who want to commit for the summer. Citadel and Citadel Securities interns will not be short on cash. Their base salary is $4,300 to $5,800 per week, depending on their role and experience. Interns also receive a signing bonus and can choose to live in corporate housing or receive a $15,000 housing stipend.

The program itself is designed to reflect the firms’ day-to-day work, not a simplified training role. Interns will work across quantitative research, investment and trading, and engineering.

A snapshot of the class shows just how broad the recruiting footprint is. The cohort has more than 350 interns and comes from more than 90 schools globally. Among the most represented are MIT, University of Chicago, Stanford, Georgia Tech, and UT Austin.

About 90% of interns come from technical backgrounds such as mathematics, physics, and computer science, while the rest are finance and economics majors. The class includes more than a dozen USA Computing Olympiad Platinum award winners and 20 International Olympiad medalists.

Selection is where the AI question shows up most clearly. During the recruitment process, Citadel assessed applicants on their AI fluency as well as good judgment. Wang said that many strong candidates knew how to leverage new tools and help AI code effectively. but the “A-plus” candidates were separated by judgment and adaptability.

Figi said soft skills matter, but he insisted a traditional STEM degree still carries weight—even if “traditional STEM skills aren’t as crucial.”

“We like people who pursue STEM degrees not just because of their technical expertise, but because it’s hard,” he said. “These are people who want to challenge themselves, and it requires a certain level of raw intellectual horsepower that will push them forward no matter how tools evolve.”

He also suggested that the work may be more cognitively demanding even if tools handle more of the routine: this year’s interns, he said, will have more time to think about higher-order, complex problems, which will likely make the role “more interesting.”

Citadel and Citadel Securities say the evaluation structure for interns stays grounded in impact, even as the intern role changes. Interns work on team projects with real business implications and have access to the same suite of AI tools available to full-time employees. Wang and Figi said interns also have weekly one-on-one conversations with their managers and ongoing communication with team members.

At the end of the summer, interns present their projects to business leaders. Griffin and Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao review return offers.

Figi said that while no one can predict exactly how the summer will go, he expects most interns to receive return offers, as they have in past years. The firms don’t set specific quotas for returns. Instead, Figi said they evaluate whether each intern could be “wildly successful” individually.

The companies tie that approach to a long-running belief in campus hiring. Figi said campus hires are around twice as likely to one day be considered high performers, based on annual performance reviews. He also framed the recruiting drive as a competitive requirement, not a nice-to-have.

“We’re going to continue to have an almost insatiable appetite for exceptional talent, and we’ll continue trying to identify as much of it as we can because we believe it’s a critical competitive advantage,” Figi said. “Once we identify that talent, we’ll move incredibly fast to secure it.”

Around all of it is a larger tension: even as AI is changing the shape of junior work. Citadel’s message is that the entry point still matters—and that it can be widened without lowering standards. For the class now under way in Palm Beach. the stakes are immediate: they’ll be judged on what they build. how they adapt. and whether their judgment keeps pace with tools getting faster.

Citadel Citadel Securities Ken Griffin Iris Wang Fabian Figi interns Palm Beach AI hiring campus recruitment quantitative finance hedge funds hiring selection rate recruiting