Citadel's 2025 Intern Class Is Its Biggest Ever — and Nearly Impossible to Join

Ken Griffin's Citadel and its market-making arm Citadel Securities are kicking off their largest-ever intern cohort this summer, with more than 350 interns drawn from a pool exceeding 115,900 applicants. The acceptance rate: a razor-thin 0.36%, making it statistically harder to land a Citadel internship than admission to most Ivy League schools. The class size is up from last year's record, reflecting both the firms' expanding business and their conviction that campus recruiting is a genuine competitive edge.

The compensation reflects that conviction. Interns earn $4,300 to $5,800 per week in base salary — depending on role and experience — plus a signing bonus and either corporate housing or a $15,000 housing stipend. Some interns hold PhDs. At the end of the summer, Ken Griffin himself and Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao personally review return-offer decisions, and historically a majority of interns receive one. Campus hires also go on to be roughly twice as likely to be rated high performers compared to other entry-level recruits.

AI fluency has become a central filter in the selection process. Recruiters looked for candidates who could effectively leverage AI tools and guide AI-assisted coding — but the top-tier picks were distinguished less by technical chops than by judgment and adaptability. Fabian Figi, who leads recruiting at Citadel Securities, made the case that STEM degrees still matter not for their specific skills, but because they signal the intellectual horsepower needed to adapt as tools keep evolving. Griffin himself recently reversed his earlier skepticism of AI, acknowledging the technology can now compress weeks or months of PhD-level finance work into hours.

This summer's interns will work on real business projects using the same AI tools as full-time staff, with weekly one-on-ones with managers and direct exposure to senior leadership. The broader Wall Street landscape is shifting similarly: Millennium is launching an investing internship program in 2027, and Balyasny is rolling out a nine-month post-graduate training program called Catalyst. Meanwhile, AI labs have been aggressively recruiting quants away from hedge funds with multimillion-dollar packages, adding urgency to firms' efforts to lock in talent early.