PhD Research Internship: Low-Latency ML on Custom Hardware

IMC Trading; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 203,000 - 248,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Paid leave

Insurance

Job summary

IMC Trading in Chicago invites a PhD candidate to undertake an ML-focused research internship that maps to our hardware acceleration efforts. You will own a focused project, present findings to the team, and deliver a prototype or benchmark enabling future work.

You will collaborate with hardware engineers and researchers to deploy ML inference on custom hardware and gain practical experience in low-latency systems. A discretionary bonus and benefits accompany the base salary."

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a related field.
• Solid understanding of hardware constraints and design trade-offs (e.g., pipelining, resource utilization, fixed-point arithmetic) that shape how ML models can be efficiently mapped onto FPGAs or custom ASICs.
• Experience with hardware fundamentals, through VHDL/SystemVerilog development, HLS tools, or ML-to-hardware frameworks like hls4ml, FINN, or Vitis AI.
• Understanding of machine learning fundamentals – neural network architectures, inference optimization, quantization techniques, ML frameworks such as PyTorch/TensorFlow.
• Proficiency in Python or similar languages for tooling, testing, and simulation.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work collaboratively across disciplines with both technical and non-technical teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop an ML focused research project based on real-world use cases
• Work hands-on with hardware engineers to implement, verify, and deploy ML inference solutions
• Track and evaluate emerging research in neural architecture search, machine learning systems and quantization methods, and determine what translates to measurable improvements in our systems
• Present your project to the team, deepening our collective understanding of an area of ML acceleration
• Gain hardware design fundamentals from skilled RTL developers and learn how they apply to our industry
• Build skills to evaluate research not only from an academic perspective, but through real-world performance constraints, engineering costs, and industry impact

Skills

Python

Communication

ML fundamentals

Cross-functional teamwork

Testing & simulation

Education

PhD candidate in EE/CS/Physics

Tools

hls4ml

FINN

Vitis AI

VHDL

SystemVerilog

Job description

IMC Trading in Chicago invites a PhD candidate to undertake an ML-focused research internship that maps to our hardware acceleration efforts. You will own a focused project, present findings to the team, and deliver a prototype or benchmark enabling future work.

You will collaborate with hardware engineers and researchers to deploy ML inference on custom hardware and gain practical experience in low-latency systems. A discretionary bonus and benefits accompany the base salary."