SMART MINDS: HOW IMC GRADUATES THINK ABOUT HARD PROBLEMS

Launchpad is not just a discovery program, it’s three intensive days, working alongside IMC’s traders, quant researchers and engineers. Not shadowing them, not watching from the sidelines. Getting involved in the actual work.

The problems you’ll encounter come straight from the work IMC does every day.

We’re not looking for people who have all the answers. We’re looking for people who are genuinely curious about finding them and who don’t stop at the obvious explanation.

Here are three examples from IMC graduates that give you a sense of the thinking we value. Different disciplines, different challenges, one consistent thread.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: LEWIS, GRADUATE ENGINEER

At a trading firm, every fraction of a second counts. So when a system crashes, it matters.

That’s what Lewis was dealing with. A crashed binary, an exception, a stacktrace. The immediate evidence pointed somewhere obvious, and the straightforward fix would have been to increase the buffer size and move on.

Instead, he kept looking. Deeper inspection uncovered a simultaneous crash on a separate thread, and beneath that, a corner case in the FPGA’s feed processing logic that had been sitting undetected for years. Hidden across layers of testing and monitoring, waiting for exactly the right conditions to surface.

“One of the most exciting things about working at IMC is learning to always challenge assumptions. When you are working on systems developed by hundreds of engineers before you, thinking through every decision and logical leap is paramount.”

— Lewis, Graduate Engineer

That instinct to stay curious past the first plausible answer is something we look for in everyone who comes through Launchpad.

SMALL NUMBER, BIG PROBLEM: JACK, GRADUATE TRADER

Not every interesting challenge arrives with a flashing warning sign. For Jack, it came in the form of a rounding convention on a cross trade. Half a dollar of risk on a product confirmed at an integer price before fair value was known.

On the surface, half a dollar feels easy to dismiss. But when the underlying price is small and the position size is large, that $0.50 rounding risk becomes genuinely significant. The return distribution goes uniform, centered at zero, with real potential to gain or lose a meaningful percentage of the notional. The question becomes: what expected return does this position need to generate to be viable, given a target Sharpe ratio over a given time window?

“Problems like this surface regularly at IMC because we operate across complex instruments and non-standard market structures. I love how it continues to test my problem-solving ability in ways I never expected when I started.”

— Jack, Graduate Trader

Taking the time to look past a number that seems small and doing the work to understand what it actually represents is a good example of the kind of thinking that makes a difference here.

WHEN THE MARKET DISAGREES: BEN, GRADUATE QUANT RESEARCHER

Every morning at a congested bridge, drivers face a version of the same problem. Three lanes funnel to one. The left lane is technically last to merge, so on paper, it looks like the sensible choice. But everyone knows that, so it fills quickly, and the advantage disappears. The right lane sits suspiciously empty. Is it a hidden opportunity, or is it blocked further ahead?

Ben uses that scenario to describe what quant research at IMC is really about. Not just finding an answer, but understanding what the market already knows, what it doesn’t, and where a genuine edge might exist.

It involves choosing which data to pay attention to, identifying which patterns are meaningful, and building models that hold up when they meet a market that doesn’t care about your assumptions.

“You’re the researcher, so you don’t know what’s there already. You are the cutting edge, and you have to decide what the cutting edge is going to be tomorrow. It’s really exciting.”

— Ben, Graduate Quant Researcher

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

Three disciplines, three distinct problems, and a common thread running through all of them. Genuine curiosity and the willingness to look further than the first answer.

That’s the kind of thinking Launchpad is designed to bring out. You don’t need to have encountered problems like these before. We’re more interested in how you engage with something unfamiliar, how you reason through ambiguity, and what you do when the straightforward path doesn’t quite add up.

Launchpad runs across two streams: Trading and Quant Research, and Engineering. The best performers leave with more than experience; they leave with a Summer Internship offer.

Ready to take on the challenge? Apply for IMC Sydney’s Launchpad 2026 and discover your edge.