Machine Learning Engineer

IMC; City Of London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

IMC, a leading research-driven trading firm, seeks an experienced Machine Learning Engineer to build and optimise systems for training and inference at scale across global operations. You will collaborate with quantitative researchers, hardware specialists and software engineers to accelerate experimentation, training speed and real-time deployments.

You will contribute to ML Research Engineering and ML Performance Engineering, leveraging GPU acceleration and low-level optimisations to push the

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in machine learning, focusing on training or inference systems.
• Production software engineering with ownership of deployed systems.
• Solid understanding of modern ML workloads and model behaviour.
• Systems mindset with emphasis on measurement for performance, scale or reliability.
• Strong collaboration and ability to justify technical decisions across teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop large-scale distributed training pipelines for complex datasets and models.
• Partner with quantitative researchers to automate ML experiments, hyperparameter tuning and retraining.
• Work with HPC specialists to optimise workflows, improve training speed and reduce compute cost.
• Build and optimise low-latency inference pipelines for real-time production use.
• Extend and improve ML frameworks and open-source tools for better performance.
• Design scalable model infrastructure for high-volume trading data and real-time predictions.
• Evaluate and adopt third-party tools to enhance model development and inference.

Skills

Python

Production software engineering

ML fundamentals

Systems mindset

Collaboration

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

CUDA

Job description

Machine Learning Engineers at IMC play a pivotal role in building the systems that drive training and deployment of large-scale ML models across IMC's global operations. They collaborate with quantitative researchers, hardware specialists and software engineers to build robust systems that get the most out of GPU acceleration, distributed computing and the broader open-source ML ecosystem. ML Engineers' work directly shapes how fast we can experiment, iterate and deploy, accelerating the cycle that turns a research idea into a live trading strategy.

This is a unique opportunity to solve problems at the intersection of advanced machine learning and trading, where your contributions will shape the future of IMC's technology and trading capabilities.

As a team, our Machine Learning Engineers broadly work across two areas: ML Research Engineering, focused on the systems and frameworks researchers use to train, evaluate and iterate on models at scale; and ML Performance Engineering, focused on making ML workloads execute as efficiently as possible, typically through GPU and low-level systems optimisation. These aren't rigid tracks, and there is overlap between them. You will bring depth of expertise in at least one of these focus areas and collaborate closely with global team members.

Your Core Responsibilities:

ML Research Engineering:

• Develop large-scale distributed training pipelines that manage complex datasets and models.
• Partner with quantitative researchers to automate ML experiments, hyperparameter tuning and model retraining.
• Work with HPC specialists to optimise workflows, improve training speed and reduce compute cost.

ML Performance Engineering:

• Build and optimise low-latency inference pipelines, ensuring models deliver real-time predictions in production systems.
• Maximise performance in training and inference using GPU hardware and acceleration libraries.

Across both areas:

• Extend and improve the internals of machine learning frameworks and open-source tools to raise their performance for our workloads.
• Design scalable model infrastructure capable of handling high-volume trading data and delivering real-time, high-accuracy predictions.
• Evaluate and roll out third-party tools that enhance model development, training and inference capabilities.

Your Skills and Experience:

Core, regardless of focus area:

• 3+ years' experience in machine learning, with a focus on training or inference systems.
• Production software engineering: Python, testing discipline and genuine ownership of systems once they ship.
• Machine learning fundamentals: you understand modern ML workloads beyond high-level APIs and can reason about model behaviour, correctness and performance at the level relevant to your area of expertise.
• A systems mindset: you reach for measurement before opinion on performance, scale or reliability issues, and can make sound build-versus-buy decisions.
• Strong collaboration: comfortable explaining the reasoning behind your technical decisions, working through differing perspectives with researchers and adapting your approach when the evidence supports it.

Depth in one or more of the following:

• Distributed training and large-scale systems: parallelism strategy, data pipelines and checkpointing; frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow or JAX.
• GPU performance and low-level optimisation: reasoning about memory, compute and latency at the device level, and optimising performance across kernels, compilers and hardware (e.g. CUDA, Triton or equivalent).
• Production inference systems: hands-on experience building and hardening real-time, low-latency prediction pipelines in high-performance environments.
• Numerics and correctness at scale: low-precision effects, KV caching, batching, and knowing which optimisations stay bit-exact.

Also a plus:

• Exposure to cloud platforms and orchestration tools.
• A track record of contributing to open-source projects in machine learning, data science or distributed systems.

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.