Technology sits at the heart of everything we do at IMC. Our innovative trading systems make millions of trading decisions every day. But that’s only part of what makes IMC tick. Behind every trade, behind every technological breakthrough, are our people – including our talented team of data engineers. Here, we share an insight into the vital contribution they make to IMC’s success.

At IMC, data is the fuel that powers our operations. By analyzing vast amounts of information on our data platform, we’re able to conduct trader analysis, simulation, and reporting – arming our traders with insights that give us an edge over our competitors. 

All this data needs to travel through a pipeline, from input to storage to transformation into usable information – and that’s where our senior database engineers come in. Using a suite of leading “Big Data” tools, they develop and maintain our data pipelines, ensuring a consistent flow of cleansed, consolidated, and integrated information. They also develop and extend our in-house data toolkits, which structure whole petabytes of information into precise and useful analytics for our trading teams.

Alongside managing our entire big data ecosystem, IMC data engineers work closely with traders and developers on specific data problems, helping them identify solutions that match their problem space and harmonize with our internal data platform. That’s why, when hiring for these roles, we favor candidates with strong communication and collaboration skills, as well as exceptional ability in statistical analysis, coding, and scripting.

IMC data engineers use a wide variety of tools to create complex, reliable, and scalable data products. Because the full range of our technologies is constantly expanding, the work always stays fresh and exciting. 

Currently, our pipelines are built using Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, and AWS. In terms of software development, we use Java and Python to develop our toolkits, with SQL playing a significant role in other areas. When running code in containerized environments, we use Docker and Kubernetes, amongst other platforms.

We expect candidates to have plenty of experience in Kafka, our data-streaming platform, as well as expert knowledge in Unix scripting using Bash, TCSH, ZSH, and Python. On the DevOps side of things, our tools include TeamCity, Gerrit, and JIRA. 

It’s an impressive stack, to be sure, but we don’t use all this technology for its own sake. No matter what tool we’re deploying, our data engineers maintain a laser focus on user benefits, delivering products that set our traders up for success. 

IMC’s flat organizational structure means our data engineers enjoy plenty of freedom and flexibility in their roles from the outset. New hires have plenty of scope to carve out a niche for themselves based on their skillset and career priorities, whether that’s developing innovative new data products or specializing in managing our data architecture. Data engineering is an incredibly diverse field, and the opportunities on offer at IMC are just as varied.

As you develop your career at IMC, you can share your expertise by mentoring new hires or managing teams in a People Leader role. But we don’t expect everyone to take this route. Many of our data engineers instead choose to specialize as Individual Contributors, where they make an equally large impact by focusing on complex, long-running projects that take weeks or months to complete.

While there’s no shortage of different career paths available, they’ve all got several important things in common. Our data engineers can always expect a highly competitive salary, an inclusive and sociable company culture, as well as numerous opportunities to expand their trading knowledge by collaborating with gifted colleagues in other functions. 

In the world of trading, insight and success are one and the same. Our traders need informative, accessible analytics to keep enhancing their strategies – and these are only available thanks to our talented team of data engineers. For anyone that lives and breathes data, IMC is the perfect place to solve intricate problems and use their talents to shape the future of trading.