CHI - 2026 - Systems Engineer

Systems Engineer - Global Development Platform

The Platform Engineering organization at IMC Trading is focused on accelerating tech team workflows through providing self-service tools, services, documentation, and support. Platform Engineering is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the underlying runtime platforms that IMC’s software applications depend on. The mission is to streamline development processes, establish a consistent technical foundation across regions, and empower teams with the necessary resources to innovate efficiently.

Platform Engineering is a global team and acts as a bridge between the technical requirements of application development and the practical aspects of deploying and maintaining those applications in a production environment, minimizing friction, and ensuring that tech teams can operate seamlessly and drive progress forward.

The way software gets built is changing fast. AI-assisted and agent-driven development has significantly increased development volume across the firm, and our systems are feeling it. We see this as an opportunity: rather than simply scaling to keep up, we’re using AI and automation to transform how we operate our developer platform.

The Platform Engineering team is seeking a versatile, hands-on Systems Engineer in Chicago, where our core build infrastructure lives, to play a critical role in enhancing and optimizing our developer services infrastructure. You will join a highly experienced global team that supports a wide array of critical systems, including source control, continuous integration pipelines, artifact repositories, and observability tools, all of which are vital to the stability and performance of our trading platforms and are used by software engineering, research, and trading teams across IMC.

Your Core Responsibilities:

• Optimize and enhance the reliability, scalability, and performance of our development services infrastructure, including artifact repositories (Nexus), CI systems (TeamCity, Jenkins), source control (GitLab), and Bazel remote execution clusters.
• Administer and oversee source control systems, continuous integration services and build agents, artifact repositories, metrics, logging, observability tools, and related systems across multiple data centers and regions, both in on-premises environments and leveraging AWS cloud services.
• Drive operational excellence through failover and redundancy, capacity planning, and clear, well-maintained runbooks for every service.
• Diagnose and resolve production incidents swiftly, supporting Global Operations in a ‘follow the sun’ model and working with regional peers to guarantee continuous 24/7 system availability.
• Help build our on-call and paging practices from the ground up as more markets and teams move to 24/7, with the goal of quiet, highly automated operations.
• Identify and eliminate system performance bottlenecks and drive uptime improvements through proactive automation, monitoring, and performance tuning, including using AI to automate operational work.
• Support newer platform services, such as our AI model gateway (LiteLLM).
• Integrate and deploy new Cloud SaaS solutions, collaborating cross-functionally to deliver innovative tools and functionalities to our teams.
• Partner with development teams globally to align system capabilities with their evolving needs, ensuring seamless operations and support and boosting organizational efficiency.

Your Skills and Experience:

• 1-3 years of work experience in a relevant role (SRE, platform, DevOps, infrastructure, or similar)
• 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 in operating and enhancing services across various environments, designing and implementing disaster recovery plans, high availability (HA) 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
• A self-starter and doer: give you a problem and you’ll go figure it out
• Strong communicator who enjoys working with many different teams and adapting how you engage with each

Nice to Have:

• Experience at a startup or scale-up where you wore many hats and built systems from scratch
• Experience in a fast-paced environment such as trading or financial services
• Interest in applying LLMs and AI to operations (no prior experience required; we’ll help you learn)

Why You’ll Love This Role:

• A front-row seat to a shift in the industry. Agent-driven development is changing how software is built, and you’ll help define how platform operations keep pace, using AI to do it.
• Real ownership. You’ll be one of the key people in Chicago who understands how our build infrastructure runs end to end, with direct influence on its direction.
• Global impact. Your work supports engineering, research, and trading teams across all of IMC’s offices.
• Startup energy, established firm. IMC has big ambitions and is growing fast, and the change in this space over the past year has been bigger than in the previous five.

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.