The HBK Summer Intern Experience

Read a summary from two of our recent interns and learn more about what it's like to be a part of the HBK family for a summer.

HBK Intern: Shray

Shray joined our intern class of 2022 working with our Strategy team in Dallas. Shray graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with majors in Computer Science and Finance. Shray joined HBK full-time in 2023 as a Software Developer on our Strategy team.

Tell us about your summer internship at HBK

I interned on the Strategy team at HBK, and the best aspect of the internship was being part of multiple projects the team was working on. Instead of focusing on one project, my internship consisted of four to five smaller projects focusing on various aspects of HBK’s investments. This provided me the opportunity to interact with several HBK employees and develop a more wholistic understanding of the company.

What does a typical day as an HBK intern look like? Tell us your highlights!

Throughout the day, I worked on a variety of projects. I had a mentor that sat right next to me, so if I had any questions, I could easily ask. The mentor was very helpful, thorough, and most importantly patient in answering my questions. During my internship, one of my projects involved working with an employee in the London office. To address the time zone difference, I would work on this project in the morning, so I could reach out to London if I have any questions. I was also invited to attend meetings with my manager and various teams across HBK to discuss and solve long-term goals within the business. This enabled me to learn more about how each team contributes to the firm's success. My manager and I had regular discussions to plan out how to best tackle my work and ensure there were no major roadblocks to my progress on a project.

Throughout the summer, HBK had one member from each team (trading, risk management, strategy, etc.) give a presentation on that team’s function and day-to-day responsibilities. This was quite informative and allowed me to gain a better understanding of the teams that I did not interact with during my internship. I would attend these presentations with my cohort of interns. The company also planned a series of events where interns could meet other employees such as dinners, bowling, attending a Texas Rangers’ game, and more!

As my internship started to come to an end, I gave a casual presentation to the Strategy team on the work I did during the summer.

Why did you choose to join HBK full-time?

I had an amazing internship experience with HBK. Working in a variety of areas, I had the opportunity to learn a lot about how technology can be leveraged in the financial service industry. Also, the employees I interacted with at HBK were experienced, helpful individuals that enjoyed sharing their knowledge. The company has a collaborative atmosphere, and teams work together to devise and execute the best plans to accomplish various tasks. I chose to join HBK full-time because I was eager to learn more about hedge funds and to start building my experience with a company that has great opportunities for internships and early careers.

HBK Intern: Thomas

Thomas joined our intern class of 2017 working with our core engineering team in Dallas. Thomas graduated from University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Computer Science. Thomas joined HBK full-time in 2018 as a software developer on our core engineering team.

Tell us about your summer internship at HBK

I interned on the Core Infrastructure team at HBK and my project involved working on both backend and frontend code for several services used in the firm. I was tasked with updating the admin interface used by the other developers on the team for testing or troubleshooting any problems that came up with the services.

What does a typical day as an HBK intern look like? Tell us your highlights!

A typical day started with a stand-up meeting with everyone else on the team. These meetings were nice to be a part of as an intern because it gave me an idea of what everyone else was working on.

My work on the project was split up into several smaller tasks that were assigned to me on an issue tracker. Whenever a task was completed, I would submit it for code review and get back feedback on various things I could improve in the code such as the logic or coding style. Since I was working on infrastructure that was used by a lot of other software at the firm, testing was an important focus and was something different from the usual coding I would do in school. Overall I learned a good deal about writing production quality code from this process with the help of my mentor who was available to give me guidance whenever I ran into any roadblocks.

At the end of the summer when the projects were completed and in production, all the interns had to give a presentation to everyone from different teams summarizing what we worked on. My manager was pretty involved in helping me prepare for the presentation and gave advice on presentation content and style. We had several practice runs and iterations of my presentation before I arrived at the final version. Some of the focal points of the presentation included summarizing the project so different teams understood what the project involved, explaining why the project was useful to the firm and what I learned while working on it.

Why did you choose to join HBK full-time?

After my internship I decided to accept a full time offer with HBK because of several factors. I felt the breadth and challenge of the work would allow me to grow as a developer. I found the work interesting and it exposed me to a lot of different technologies that I wasn't too familiar with. I also enjoyed getting to know everyone else on the team and thought it would be great to work with them again full time.