Desired Skills and Experience

  • IMC is currently looking for a multi-talented and passionate hands-on System Performance Engineer to play a critical role in analyzing, optimizing, and continuously tune the complete trading stack, in order to improve performance of our low latency trading systems on financial exchanges.
  • As a performance engineer, you will interact heavily with other teams and be exposed to low latency technologies such as microwave links and FPGAs that are being used by thousands of trading applications daily.
  • Your primary source of information are full network captures that amount to terabytes of data per day. All these must be reliably captured, stored on an accessible medium, decoded and analyzed in order to find patterns, provide answers, verify theories and assumptions.
  • You will also be given the opportunity to try in a real environment any innovative state-of-the-art technology, be it in early initial commercialization phases or via collaboration with Universities / Research centers. This is done by implementing quick internal prototypes of early alpha versions that access both their latency improvements and their real-world applicability.
  • Prototyping: be able to quickly try-out many Ideas, Solutions and Technologies… all at the same time.
  • Automation: be able to fully automate all Measurement, Data collection and Analysis via scripting
  • Measurement: be a latency measurement detective; think Sherlock Holmes and the case of the missing packet sniffer microsecond
  • Communication: be able to share / route the appropriate level of information with both traders and other sister IT teams.
  • Knowledge: Excellent understanding of computer internals, networking and Linux (at least two out of three). Skilled in reverse engineering techniques.
  • Scripting: Fluency on Python, skilled in Bash (in order to optimize “programmer time”, if necessary at the expense of “computer time”).
  • Programming: Skilled in either C or C++
  • Personality: Inquisitive mind, love solving puzzles. After internal training, being able to work self-sufficiently with minimal guidance.
  • Experience: typically MSc + 5 years work experience. Preference to a “T-shaped profile” that mixes both wide + deep skills on a need basis.