IMC Trading Interview Questions
& Process for Software Engineers

IMC runs different pipelines for different roles and says so on its own careers pages. The trader and quant stream is a separate world of BrainsFirst cognitive games, mental arithmetic, and a market-making Superday. This guide covers the Software Engineer stream, so confirm your track at the first recruiter contact rather than borrowing a trader's prep. The engineering spine holds across candidate reports and IMC's own description: a CV screen, a HackerRank online assessment, a one-way recorded video, a recruiter call, and a final loop built around a long working session. IMC lists its open engineering roles on its own careers site.

The center of gravity is not where a big-tech plan expects. IMC is a market maker where microseconds are money, so the loop leans on low-latency thinking, CS fundamentals, and how you reason under performance constraints rather than an exotic-algorithm gauntlet. The assessment format flexes by role, region, and intake: US new-grads usually sit a roughly two-hour HackerRank test of two medium-to-hard problems, some intakes add multiple-choice questions, and Amsterdam software roles have been given a four-hour take-home instead. The stages themselves can run five or six deep over several weeks.

Past the assessment the loop turns human in three distinct shapes. A one-way recorded video comes first, roughly ten questions mixing behavioural prompts with technical "agree or disagree and explain" statements, answered against a timer with no interviewer on the line. Then a one-hour CS-fundamentals conversation on threads, memory, hashing, and sorting. Finally the working session, the stage that actually decides the offer.

That working session is the round nobody preps for, and the gap is the whole point. Two senior engineers give you the problem, thirty minutes to read it alone, then about an hour solving it together on an approximation of IMC's real trading system. IMC says outright that it does not care much about the end product; it assesses how you work, how fast you pick things up, and how you reason about performance and trade-offs. It is deliberately not a LeetCode onsite, and it plays like a day-to-day meeting with colleagues.

One-Way VideoRecorded

A recorded interview of roughly ten questions, mixing behavioural prompts ("why IMC", "how would your friends describe you", "a time you bounced back from poor performance") with technical "agree or disagree with this statement and explain" items. You get about fifteen seconds to read and one to two minutes to answer, with no interviewer on the line. A variant swaps the set for a single data-structure design question, roughly a minute and a half to think and five to answer.

CS Fundamentals 1:1Theory

A roughly one-hour conversation with an engineer in your strongest language, mostly Java or C++, on how the machine actually works: what a thread is, what happens between typing a URL and a rendered page, hashcodes and hashtable versus linear search, quicksort trade-offs, signed versus unsigned. It is a theory round, not a puzzle hunt.

The Working SessionDecides the offer

The flagship stage: two to three hours with two senior engineers. Roughly thirty minutes reading the problem alone, then about an hour of collaborative solutioning on an approximation of IMC's actual trading system, focused on performance and alternatives. IMC states plainly that it grades how you work over the end product, so it plays like a day-to-day meeting with colleagues, not a pass/fail submission.

IMC's coding problems do not come from a public problem bank. The HackerRank assessment is DS&A-heavy, and its recurring shapes are concrete: a grid-pathfinding problem, "Does the Path Exist?", solved with BFS or DFS and memoization over a custom move-set with obstacle cells, is the signature. Close behind is a per-second simulation, "a Premium question" and the equivalent "a Premium question", that orchestrates two queues by who passed last. Data-structure design rounds out the core: an O(1) stack that also answers sum() or min().

But the assessment is the filter, not the interview. The real depth sits in the CS-fundamentals round and the working session: what a thread is, what happens when you type a URL, hashtable versus linear search, quicksort trade-offs, and a low-latency mindset that IMC frames as "system design but low-latency style, nothing like web apps." A candidate who spent every hour on hard graph algorithms and none on how memory and concurrency behave has prepared for the wrong interview, so weight the assessment toward these named archetypes and the rounds toward fundamentals and performance reasoning.

Get the honest version first: IMC does not run a hyperscale-web design round for software engineers. There is no whiteboard where you shard a feed for a billion users or size a CDN. For graduate and early-career roles, design barely appears as its own stage; the working session and CS-fundamentals round carry the loop instead.

What exists is low-latency flavoured and mostly senior. IMC describes its design surface as "system design but low-latency style, nothing like web apps," and a senior candidate reported a classical multi-hour low-latency design session. The one worked design this section builds is in that key: a low-latency market-data feed, how you ingest a flood of updates, lay out an order-book path in memory, keep the hot path deterministic, and choose data structures by their cost in cache misses and cycles rather than by raw scale.

So read the round as latency-first and sharply level-gated. If you are early-career, do not over-invest here at the expense of the assessment and the fundamentals depth that decide your loop. If you are senior, prepare one clean low-latency design and be ready to walk the architecture of a fast system you have shipped.

An IMC offer is a proprietary-trading package, not a big-tech one, and the shape surprises people coming from FAANG. IMC is privately held, so there is no public-market stock grant, no four-year vest, and no refresh cycle to model. The package is cash-heavy: a base plus a discretionary bonus settled against firm and desk performance, plus a sign-on.

IMC runs its Software Engineer track separately from the Trader, Quant, and Researcher stream, each with its own loop and bar. The compensation figures for each level live in the offer lesson, not on this page.

Because there is no equity to argue over, the movable surface is narrow. For an early-career hire the base tends to be banded, so the marginal ask moves to the sign-on. For an experienced hire the level you enter at is the larger lever. The discretionary bonus looks like a lever and is not: it settles against performance after you join, so ask how it is structured but do not counter on a figure.

Anchor a competing offer to quant and trading peers like Hudson River Trading, Jane Street, Citadel Securities, or Jump rather than to FAANG, because that is the market IMC prices against.