CHI - 2026 - Systems Engineer

IMC • Chicago, IL

18d • Onsite

About The Position

IMC Trading’s Platform Engineering organization provides self-service tools, services, documentation, and support to accelerate technology team workflows. It designs, builds, and maintains the runtime platforms that software applications depend on, helping establish a consistent technical foundation across regions and enabling teams to develop and operate software efficiently.

The Systems Engineer will join the global Platform Engineering team in Chicago, where IMC’s core build infrastructure is located. The role focuses on enhancing and optimizing developer services infrastructure, including systems that support source control, continuous integration, artifact management, and observability. These services are used by software engineering, research, and trading teams and are critical to the stability and performance of IMC’s trading platforms. The engineer will help adapt platform operations to increasing development volume, including through automation and AI.

IMC is a research-driven trading firm that uses quantitative modeling, machine learning, engineering, proprietary technology, and capital to operate across global markets. The firm has provided liquidity across trading venues since 1989.

Requirements

• 1–3 years of work experience in a relevant role such as SRE, platform, DevOps, infrastructure, or a similar field.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent.
• Strong programming experience in Python or Go; shell scripting is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of Linux/Unix systems.
• Experience operating and enhancing services across different environments and designing and implementing disaster recovery plans, high-availability configurations, and failover strategies.
• Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration tools, including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or TeamCity, including managing build agents and automating build, test, and deployment processes.
• Understanding of security principles and best practices, including experience managing secrets and compliance frameworks.
• Self-starter who can independently investigate and solve problems.
• Strong communication skills and willingness to work with different teams and adapt engagement to their needs.

Nice To Haves

• Experience at a startup or scale-up, wearing many hats and building systems from scratch.
• Experience in a fast-paced environment such as trading or financial services.
• Interest in applying LLMs and AI to operations; prior experience is not required.

Responsibilities

• Optimize and improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of developer services infrastructure, including Nexus, TeamCity, Jenkins, GitLab, and Bazel remote execution clusters.
• Administer source control systems, CI services and build agents, artifact repositories, metrics, logging, observability tools, and related systems across data centers and regions, both on premises and using AWS.
• Drive operational excellence through failover and redundancy, capacity planning, and clear, maintained runbooks for each service.
• Diagnose and resolve production incidents, support Global Operations in a follow-the-sun model, and work with regional peers to ensure continuous 24/7 system availability.
• Help develop on-call and paging practices as more markets and teams move to 24/7 operations, with a focus on quiet, highly automated operations.
• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks and improve uptime through automation, monitoring, and performance tuning, including the use of AI to automate operational work.
• Support newer platform services, including the AI model gateway LiteLLM.
• Integrate and deploy new Cloud SaaS solutions in collaboration with other teams.
• Partner with development teams globally to align system capabilities with their needs, ensure smooth operations and support, and improve organizational efficiency.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level