Research Engineer

IMC Trading; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 720,000 - 960,000; Full time

Job summary

IMC Trading is seeking engineers for Research Engineering to turn research ideas into scalable production pipelines. You'll build data ingestion, feature storage, validators, and experiment trackers while collaborating with researchers and traders.

You will work across languages (Python and C++) and own systems in production, ensuring robust deployment and fast feedback loops for continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• Proficient in Python and C++ for production code.
• Experience shipping production systems.
• Curious about other teams' architectures.
• Excellent collaboration with researchers and traders.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain pipelines from research idea to production.
• Collaborate with researchers to translate needs into systems.
• Design data ingestion, feature storage, and experiment tracking.
• Deploy solutions safely and iteratively with feedback loops.

Skills

Python

C++

Production code

Cross-team collaboration

Multi-project work

Job description

The Research Engineering team develops and deploys the pipelines connecting a research idea all the way to its rollout in production. We exist to ensure that the entire pipeline describing our research is efficient, effective, and scalable. People in our team are avid collaborators and work in tight feedback loops with our researchers. We talk through problems on desk, prepare solutions same day, and work out how to deploy safely for tomorrow.

The scope of the team covers anything that accelerates the path from research to production at massive scale. This could be designing our external data ingestion pipelines, writing our feature discovery and storage systems, building our model validators and experiment trackers, authoring and deploying a bespoke algorithm, or figuring out how to roll out something novel.

We use a broad toolkit including Python, C++ and internal domain-specific languages, and are happy to pick up new tools and languages as required.

About You

• You write production code in both Python and C++. You reach for the second one when it matters, and you know when it does.
• You're naturally curious about how other teams' systems work, not just your own, and you often end up being the person who spots where things won't fit together before it becomes a problem.
• You enjoy working on many projects at once, seeing connections and opportunities between them which others miss.
• You’re motivated to solve issues with whatever tool is best, rather than a preference towards deep specialisation in one area.
• You like working with research stakeholders across the business and you're good at figuring out what someone actually needs, not just what they asked for.
• You've done this commercially. You've owned something in production that other people relied on. Not necessarily big, but something you had to maintain, debug and live with long after you shipped it

What You Don’t Need

A finance background. Every language we touch. A particular set of years in any particular role. We hire engineers who like to solve the problems our traders face - we'll teach you the context on the ground.

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.