IMC Trading Interview Process: How Hiring Decisions Are Made

IMC is a privately held market maker, founded in Amsterdam in 1989 and active on more than a hundred exchanges. The way it hires reflects the way it runs. The culture is deliberately flat and non-hierarchical, engineers pick up real responsibility in their first weeks, and the ladder is short. At a firm like this the level travels with the requisition. And the yes or no turns on one round more than the rest combined: the working session where two senior engineers watch how you think.

IMC decides on how you work. In IMC's own words, the HackerRank at the front of the loop is "purely theoretical," a time-saving filter that gets you into the room and tells the panel little else. The decision happens in the working session. IMC's brief to its interviewers is explicit: they don't care much about the end product. They assess how you reason, how fast you pick things up, and how you weigh performance and trade-offs out loud. Compensation lives in the offer lesson; this page covers the level you land on and how the call gets made.

The Level Ladder

IMC doesn't publish a detailed internal grade rubric, so read the ladder through the public titles the firm and its postings use: Graduate, Early-Career and Experienced software engineer, with senior scope on top. Read each for the responsibility it owns. A flat firm calibrates on demonstrated scope more than tenure. The trader and quant tracks run as a separate ladder with a separate loop, so keep them out of your leveling picture. IMC is private with no public-market stock, so comp is cash-heavy: a base plus a discretionary bonus and often a sign-on. The bands live in the offer lesson.

Title	Who it fits	System design round
Graduate Software Engineer	New grads and campus hires	Usually not; the loop centers the working session and CS fundamentals
Early-Career Software Engineer	Engineers with a little experience, just above the graduate rung	Usually not; same center as the graduate loop
Experienced Software Engineer	Mid and senior ICs who own features and systems	Often added, low-latency flavored

IMC's public software engineering titles. Senior scope sits above Experienced, and the Trader and Quant tracks run a separate ladder.

Graduate Software Engineer: entry / new-grad. The campus and new-grad rung, for engineers early enough that the loop centers the working session and CS fundamentals rather than a classic system design round. levels.fyi lines this up with its L1 code.
Early-Career Software Engineer: IMC's own posting term. The title IMC uses on its own early-career software engineering reqs, sitting just above the graduate rung for engineers with a little experience. You take on well-scoped work with a team while the firm hands you responsibility quickly.
Experienced Software Engineer: mid / senior IC. The experienced-hire band, owning features and systems inside a team and, higher up, broader technical ownership. Experienced and senior loops are the ones that add a low-latency system design round. levels.fyi maps this range up to its L4 code.
Separate ladder: Trader / Quant. The Trader and Quant tracks are a different process end to end: aptitude games, mental arithmetic, a market-making game and a trading-simulator Superday, with their own leveling. Don't read trader leveling into a software role.

The L1 through L4 codes on comparison sites are that site's own convention for lining IMC up against big tech. They map the graduate rung to L1 and the experienced range up to L4. They aren't IMC internal grade codes, and a recruiter will talk in the public titles. Anchor to the title and the scope it describes. If a recruiter floats a level out loud, get it confirmed in writing, since that's what the offer is built on.

Who Decides, and How

The software engineer pipeline runs in a clear order: a CV screen and recruiter call, a HackerRank online assessment, a one-way recorded video, a short HR call, then a final technical loop of one-on-ones. The recruiter coordinates that loop and carries the outcome; the engineers on the final loop own the technical read. The stages don't carry equal weight. The HackerRank is a pass-or-fail gate that IMC describes as a filter. The video and the CS-fundamentals conversation feed the picture. The two-and-a-half to three-hour working session with two senior engineers is where the yes or no gets settled. No Amazon-style bar raiser or cross-org hiring committee surfaces in candidate reports, though no absence is confirmed either. Treat the decision as panel and hiring-team led, and hold the finer mechanics loosely.

The IMC Trading angle

The working session grades your way of working, so behave like a colleague. IMC's own interviewers describe the deciding round as a discussion that emulates talking through a problem with an IMC colleague, followed by a programming exercise on an approximation of the real trading system. One participant compared it to a day-to-day meeting with the team. So the panel watches whether you reason about performance and alternatives out loud, pick things up fast when they steer, and stay collaborative on a dense problem. Behavioral signal gets judged the same way, as fit and way of working. The yardstick is IMC's six values: Dare to continuously innovate, Champion the best ideas, Collaborate to succeed, Take responsibility, Keep both feet on the ground, and Build for our future. There's no scored value-by-value scorecard, so don't prep for an Amazon-style rubric.

What Tips a Borderline Call

The working session and the CS-fundamentals round are collaborative by design. A borderline call breaks on how you engage more than on a polished finish. Each direction has its tells.

Tips a borderline call toward yes

Reasoning about performance out loud: naming the cost of an approach and weighing alternatives as you build. That's the low-latency, systems-minded instinct the working session looks for.
Picking things up fast and staying collaborative: adjusting when the two senior engineers steer, and treating the room as a working meeting with colleagues instead of an exam you sit in silence.
CS fundamentals from real understanding: explaining threads, hashing, memory and sorting trade-offs cleanly from first principles. The one-hour theory round is a genuine conversation.
A concrete why IMC: showing genuine curiosity about a market-making firm and about measurable, fast-feedback engineering, since that question recurs across the loop.

Tips it toward no

Polishing the end product over showing your process: chasing a tidy finished answer when IMC has said plainly it doesn't care much about the end product.
Going quiet and heads-down: solving alone in silence in a round built to watch you think and collaborate reads as a fit risk.
A clean HackerRank and thin depth: clearing the filter but going vague on the performance cost model, concurrency, or how a data structure sits in memory. Strong coders most often stall here.
Prepping the trader loop by mistake: drilling mental-arithmetic sprints, aptitude games and the market-making game. Those gate traders and never appear on the software engineer loop.

What the Reports Do Not Say

Two gaps, named plainly so you don't guess. First, there's no trustworthy IMC pass or acceptance rate. IMC publishes none, so any figure quoted for the HackerRank or the final loop is folklore. Second, there's no sourced down-level story and no documented rule for how the panel turns its reads into one yes or no. The decision is panel and hiring-team led, and how a borderline call breaks isn't published anywhere reliable. This guide won't invent a cause, a committee or a rate to fill those gaps.

Confirm the title and scope you're being considered for early, since the level travels with the requisition at a firm this flat. Put your real preparation into the working session, the round that decides. Treat the CS-fundamentals conversation and the behavioral video as genuine signal. When the details thin out, don't fill the gap with lore. Comp bands and negotiation live in the offer lesson; the round-by-round shape lives in the process lesson.

Common questions

How hard is it to get hired at IMC Trading?

Hard, and the working session decides it: two and a half to three hours with two senior engineers on an approximation of IMC's trading system. IMC calls the HackerRank in front of it a time-saving filter. Strong coders most often stall after a clean HackerRank, going thin on performance, concurrency or how memory works. Going quiet in a round built to watch you think hurts too. IMC publishes no pass rate.

What are the software engineer levels at IMC Trading?

IMC uses public titles: Graduate, Early-Career and Experienced Software Engineer, with senior scope above. New grads start at Graduate. Engineers with a little experience come in as Early-Career, and industry hires with real ownership land in the Experienced band. Comparison sites code this range L1 to L4, but that's their convention. Get the title and scope from your recruiter in writing.

What is IMC's acceptance rate?

IMC doesn't publish one, so ignore any specific percentage on a prep forum. The shape of the filter is verifiable. It's a private market maker with a small, deliberately flat engineering org and a HackerRank gate that ends weak submissions. The final loop centers on a working session graded on how you work. Prepare as though every round is graded closely, keep competing offers warm, and set the scary numbers aside.

Who makes the hiring decision at IMC?

The recruiter coordinates the loop and carries the outcome. The engineers on the final technical loop own the technical read, and the two senior engineers who run the working session weigh heaviest. No dedicated bar raiser or cross-org hiring committee surfaces in candidate reports, though no absence is confirmed either. So the decision reads as panel and hiring-team led. IMC doesn't publish how those reads become one yes or no.

Key Takeaways

✓IMC levels software engineers through public titles (Graduate, Early-Career and Experienced) with senior scope on top; the Trader and Quant tracks run as a separate ladder. Read each rung for scope. The L1-L4 codes on comparison sites are those sites' convention, so confirm the title with the recruiter in writing.
✓The recruiter coordinates the loop and the engineering panel owns the technical read. No dedicated bar raiser or cross-org committee surfaces in the reports, and no absence is confirmed either. Treat the decision as panel and hiring-team led and hold the finer mechanics loosely.
✓The yes or no turns on the two-and-a-half to three-hour working session with two senior engineers. IMC grades how you work: your reasoning about performance and trade-offs and how fast you pick things up. The HackerRank is a filter by IMC's own account, and behavioral signal is judged as fit against the six values.
✓A borderline call breaks on engagement. Reasoning about performance out loud, staying collaborative, real CS-fundamentals depth and a concrete why IMC tip it toward yes. Polishing a finished answer, going quiet, thin systems depth and prepping the trader loop tip it toward no.
✓IMC publishes no pass rate and no down-level rule, so don't invent either. Prepare as if every round is graded closely, keep your other offers live, and take the comp bands from the offer lesson.

Next up:Your IMC Trading Prep Plan