How AQR Capital Interviews in 2026: Process, Sample Questions & What They Score

AQR's Greenwich internship page gives this window for summer internships and does not name a year. In India, students apply through their university placement center, and the Bangalore internship runs eight weeks from May to July. The full-time Research Analyst posting (posted November 2025, for 2026 graduates) places hires in the Global Stock Selection team or one of the Macro teams.

AQR's India page names an online test before interviews but gives no format. Blind posts (2018 to 2023) mention a CodeSignal assessment, mostly for software and research-development roles, and one Blind commenter replying to a post about the CodeSignal round says the questions were basic LeetCode medium without naming the role. QuantVault describes a 75-90 minute, 3-problem CodeSignal or HackerRank coding OA, labeled for the software and quant developer track, and sometimes a recruiter-sent math take-home of about 8 GRE-level multiple-choice questions plus 2 bonus questions instead, labeled for the quant researcher track. QuantVault's own research-track path does not list an OA. The format for research candidates varies by team and region.

Use for the Greenwich research track is unconfirmed; the only official mention is the India page

Covers background, motivation and role fit, and per extern.com also AQR's published research and factor-investing literature. The 30-minute figure comes from prep guides, not from AQR, and techinterview.org and extern.com repeat the same figure, so it is effectively one source. Tradermath lists a recruiter and phone screen stage but gives no duration.

QuantVault reports two back-to-back rounds of about 1 hour on OLS assumptions, deriving beta, coding a covariance function, outliers and return skewness, hands-on pandas and statsmodels work, plus a deep dive on your own research; it does not say whether they are by phone, video or onsite. Other guides put the screen at 60-90 minutes on probability, statistics and factor methods. PracHub relays a July 2026 Reddit post about virtual research interviews, one associated with machine learning.

Reported counts conflict: QuantVault gives 4 sessions of 45 minutes in one place and six 30-minute one-on-ones in another, sometimes with three written exams (finance, math, programming) and a deliberate stress interview; Tradermath says up to six rounds with short timed exams and a paper presentation for PhD candidates; techinterview.org says 5-7 rounds of 60-90 minutes. Content covers statistical inference, finance across asset classes, ML, projects and behavioral questions. The count varies by level and team.

Round counts and durations conflict across prep sites

techinterview.org describes a calibration meeting, then an offer in 1-3 weeks. Prep sites put the whole process at 4-8 weeks or 1-2 months from application, and extern.com says offers land in October and November for September interviews. No AQR source states a total.

No official source gives decision timing; prep-site figures conflict