Performance Engineer

As a Performance Engineer at IMC, you will play a pivotal role in analysing, optimising, and tuning our systems' interaction with exchange systems holistically. Working closely with traders and engineers, you'll be tasked with uncovering performance improvements across the trading stack. This role combines technical ingenuity with creative problem-solving to outsmart competition in one of the most demanding technical landscapes.

Your Core Responsibilities:

• Black Box Reverse Engineering and Analysis: Analyse and understand the behaviour of complex, live systems — such as exchange connectivity and market data feeds — using black-box techniques, with no source code access. Design and run statistical experiments against real data to explain emergent real-world phenomena and identify performance bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities. This is investigative work aimed at systems you can observe but not disassemble, not static binary or malware analysis.
• Experimentation & Prototyping: Design, implement, and build working prototypes to test ideas and technologies quickly — not specifications for others to build from.
• Collaboration & Communication: Liaise effectively with traders, software and hardware engineers, and infrastructure teams to share insights and implement solutions.
• System Analysis: Analyse terabytes of network data using statistical methods to identify patterns, validate hypotheses, and quantify performance improvements.

Your Skills and Experience:

Most of the following will apply — we don't expect every candidate to check every box:

• Proven commercial experience writing and shipping production code — Python and/or C++ or Java.
• Strong understanding of networking, computer internals, and Linux systems.
• Comfortable using statistics and data analysis to test hypotheses at scale, not just qualitative or manual investigation.
• System-level optimisation or low-level network optimisation — ideally applied to live/external systems rather than static binaries.
• Exposure to low-latency hardware technologies such as Intel CPUs, FPGA, or microwave links is a strong plus, though not required.

About Us

IMC is a research-driven trading firm where quantitative modeling, machine learning, and engineering shape how modern markets are traded. A stabilizing force in markets since 1989, we provide liquidity across trading venues, delivering the best outcome in value and risk management to investors. Using our own technology and capital, we build proprietary systems and algorithms that operate across global markets. Our researchers, traders, and engineers work as a collective, combining rapid experimentation, advanced infrastructure, and real-time feedback to turn insight into execution and execution into advantage.