SMART MINDS: ENGINEERING FOR A MARKET THAT NEVER STANDS STILL

When your code sends millions of orders to financial exchanges every single day, the engineering must be exceptional.

For one of our Graduate Engineers, Lewis, this is exactly what makes working at IMC both challenging and exciting. As part of the connectivity team, he builds and owns the infrastructure that links IMC’s trading strategies directly to exchanges around the world. Here's what a day in his role looks like, and why it's unlike any other engineering job out there.

Collaborating to succeed

IMC’s connectivity engineers work in lockstep with our strategy engineers and traders, carefully dissecting trading algorithms into the pieces best suited for hardware versus software. A productive day involves reading and writing code, stress-testing assumptions embedded in existing logic, and whiteboard sessions about practical implementation.

“Our main goal is to produce high-quality code that can be implemented for the business to have an immediate impact,” Lewis shares.

Traders function as the engineers’ end users. “Communicating clearly and regularly with traders ensures the systems we develop are tied directly to the use cases that motivate them,” he explains. “This sharing of ideas and inter-disciplinary awareness often leads to new ideas and improvements that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”

Across IMC’s global offices, engineers work as a single team under the same codebase, each contributing to a system that never stands still.

Building for our future

The technical toolkit is broad: C++, SystemVerilog, low-latency programming, high-performance computing, concurrency and networking all feature in the day-to-day. IMC rewards engineers who can move fluidly between specialist knowledge and broader system context, understanding the component they own and how it interacts with the layers above and below it.

The scale is what heightens the stakes. “If we encode the wrong price or violate an exchange condition, the consequences can be costly . But if we execute the right order and get the right trade at the right time, the rewards are huge,” says Lewis.

Plus, IMC is constantly competing against other groups of talented engineers and traders looking to capture the same opportunities. “With each feature that makes our systems more performant, we know that we have beaten out the competition for now, but we always need to keep iterating and improving to keep our edges,” he says.

Fostering a culture of growth

“A high performer at IMC is intelligent, curious, and a team player,” he says. The culture here isn't just about hiring the right people, but also helping them grow.

For our Graduate Engineer, growth began from his very first year. Lewis started as a C++ software engineer but expressed early on an interest in hardware due to his degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Queensland. IMC supported his curiosity through a dedicated six-week FPGA engineering program, and now he actively maintains IMC’s hardware platforms alongside his software responsibilities. “That sort of curated care makes IMC truly unique.”

And that extends to the broader culture. “The environment is technically demanding, but it is also genuinely supportive,” he shares. “Even when stakes are high, colleagues are optimistic, relaxed and united around a shared goal.”

Do you picture yourself at IMC? Apply for our 2026/27 internship and launchpad programs today.