Akuna Capital Internship: Summer Application Guide for the Options Market Maker
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Akuna Capital runs a rolling summer internship through its Akunacademy programme in Chicago, and its hiring leans hard on testing and problem-solving. Here is what the options market maker looks for, how the stages run, and how to prepare.
Akuna Capital is one of those firms students hear about through a filter question or a friend who failed an assessment and swore revenge. It is a Chicago-based proprietary trading house, founded in 2011, that makes markets in options across crypto, energy, and interest rates. Tech is the whole business model, so its intern programme looks different from a bank's: engineers, hardware people, and traders sit closer together than any bulge-bracket division chart.
That structure shapes the whole guide. You apply as a candidate for a specific track, not a generalist bucket. The assessment tests the maths and coding that track needs, the interviews push you to think aloud, and the offer lands for a two-and-a-half-month summer, not a rotating insight week.
Here is what the guide covers: what the firm does, the rolling calendar, the tracks you can apply for, the interview ladder, pay signals, and how this compares with the other Chicago firms on your list.
Quick Facts: Akuna Capital summer internship
| Item | Detail (verify on the live posting) |
|---|---|
| Apply | Akuna careers page, hosted on the firm's Greenhouse board |
| Trackr US (as of 18 Aug 2026) | 2027 Akunacademy roles live from ~10 Mar 2026, rolling, no listed close on the snapshot |
| Programme | Akunacademy, ~10 weeks over the summer, paid, based in Chicago |
| Tracks | Software engineer (C++), hardware engineer, trading, and research listings appear on the same board |
| Eligibility | Per posting; campus recruiting targets students with a summer or two before graduation |
| Visa | Stated per position; read the posting before applying from abroad |
Every date here is a snapshot of one board at one moment. Akuna posts across the year, rolls as seats fill, and a listing you saw in March can vanish or reappear by the time you read this. The live posting always wins.
What Akuna Capital actually does
Options market making means quoting buy and sell prices continuously and profiting from the spread, inventory management, and the firms' own trading edge. Akuna does this across a spread of product lines, including crypto, energy, and interest rate products, run on the tech it builds in-house.
The reason that matters for your application is the firm's engineering-first culture. A trader's edge at Akuna lives partly in the intern's own interview, but mostly in the systems an engineering intern helps build. So the interviewers are not looking for banking-style "why this firm" polish alone. They want evidence you can reason precisely, hold your nerve with a countdown clock, and explain your thinking in sentences.
Most candidates first hear about the firm through one of three doors: a mental-math assessment that filters aggressively, a technical interview about probabilities or a locked market, or a friend's internship stories about Chicago and the pay. All three doors open the same way: through the assessment and interview ladder.
The calendar is rolling, not a window
Akuna does not run a November deadline like a bank. The 2027 roles were live on the board from early March 2026 per the Trackr US snapshot, and the firm keeps posting as the year goes on. Copy that behaviour into your own plan:
- Check the careers board monthly from the autumn before your target summer. A role can appear at any point, and rolling intake means early seats fill first.
- Apply for the track you can actually do, not the most impressive one. Trading, software, and hardware interviews are different crafts and the assessment will find you out.
- Reapply if the first cycle misses. Full-time and off-cycle roles reuse the same pool, and improving a rejecting assessment is a normal path in.
- Keep the rest of your list moving in parallel. A rolling market maker runs alongside bank cycles, so let each firm's own timing drive when you act.
A tracker that holds each firm's window helps here precisely because there is no shared calendar. Log Akuna as rolling, set a monthly check, and keep your bank deadlines on their own rows. You can start for free with up to three applications on the free plan.
The tracks, and which one fits you
The summer programme is Akunacademy, about 10 weeks, paid, Chicago-based. The recruiting engines are different enough that the track matters more than the brand.
| Track | What the role actually is | Prep bias |
|---|---|---|
| Trading | Market making support, pricing, and risk decisions under a senior trader | Mental math, expected value, conditional probability, thinking aloud |
| Software engineering | Systems that quote markets and process data at low latency | C++, Python, concurrency, a project you can defend |
| Hardware engineering | The network and FPGA side of the trading systems | Latency, correctness, failure modes, signal integrity |
| Research | Pricing and signals for the options book | Probability, stats, experiment design |
The market making core binds them: an options book needs pricing, a quote system, and network gear to be fast, and no single track works without the other two. Explain which one you fit in your application rather than claiming all of them.
How the interviews actually run
Akuna does not publish its hiring process, so treat this as the pattern candidates commonly report rather than an official syllabus. The structure centres on testing and live problem-solving far more than a fixed set of behavioural rounds.
Typical stages, by track:
- Application on the Greenhouse board, with a resume that shows real analytical evidence.
- Online assessment: for trading, quantized mental math and probability under a timer. For software, coding problems that reward speed and correctness.
- Recruiter screen covering logistics, track fit, and baseline motivation.
- Technical interviews, usually multiple, where you solve maths or coding aloud while an interviewer watches your reasoning, not just your answer.
- Offer and onboarding, with the summer spent on a real desk.
The failure mode that sends most candidates home is the one between stages three and four: they can answer a problem on paper but cannot walk through it when someone is watching. Practise that exact skill, out loud, on a timer, before the real call.
How much Akuna pays, honestly
There is no official pay table, and Akuna does not publish one. What candidates describe is a pattern: Chicago trading and engineering interns are paid well relative to most finance internships, with forum-reported figures that rise and fall with the year. Treat every dollar you read as a community estimate.
Two ways to anchor yourself: compare ranges across the Chicago market-making firms, and use the actual cost of living, since Chicago housing and expenses sit below Wall Street. Our quant trader salary guide frames the full-time side, and the same logic of base plus discretionary applies to interns in rougher form.
How Akuna compares with other Chicago and quant firms
If Akuna is on your list, you are probably looking at Citadel, DRW, Jane Street, or Optiver as well. They share the quant-and-engineering culture, but the differences change your prep.
- Citadel internship guide: larger hedge-fund-scale operation with a formal campus programme and its own tests.
- DRW internship guide: another Chicago options veteran with a similarly technical screen.
- Jane Street internship guide: probability-and-puzzles reputation that rewards the same mental-math habit.
Spreading your assessments across a few of these is normal and smart: the maths prep compounds. Just keep the timings separate, because each firm rolls on its own clock.
Preparing for Akuna's assessment style
The single most useful habit is daily probability work delivered aloud. Open a timer, give yourself five to ten minutes, solve expected-value and conditional-probability problems by speaking your logic, and then rewind to see which step actually tripped you. That mirrors the assessment and the interviews at once.
For engineers, pick one project and prepare a walkthrough: what it does, where the latency lives, what fails, and what you would change. Interviewers at market makers reach for failure modes quickly, so a project you half-remember does more damage than a smaller project you fully own.
Keep the finance side ready but secondary. A clean "why trading" and one markets conversation you can give in ninety seconds matter, and our sales and trading interview questions guide gives you the vocabulary. The assessment and thinking aloud are where Akuna grades you.
Mistakes specific to market-maker applications
The first mistake is ignoring the track distinction. A trading application with engineering prep attached reads the same in the assessment as a generic one, because the questions sort you anyway. Decide the track before you apply.
The second is practising alone on paper. Akuna's interviews are conversational maths, and candidates who only solve silently lose the delivery half. Every session should be spoken out loud.
The third is timing optimism about rolling roles. Rolling does not mean "there will always be a seat." The best roles close when filled, so monthly checks and first-week-of-posting applies beat waiting for a cleaner deadline.
What to do after reading this
Targeting an options market-making summer in Chicago?
Set a monthly reminder for the Akuna careers board, pick your track early, and spend twenty minutes a day on mental math and probability spoken aloud so the assessment and interviews feel like a routine rather than a shock.
For the wider calendar of firm windows, our investment banking recruiting timeline shows how rolling firms sit alongside bank deadlines.