IMC Trading

For trading and quant streams the assessment combines cognitive and numerical tests, and the final round pairs technical stations with market-making exercises. End-to-end the loop runs across several weeks, with the firm stating it aims to return offer feedback within a couple of days of the final round. Because the final round is an in-office assessment day, candidates should expect to clear a single concentrated window of travel or remote work rather than the staggered phone screens common at investment banks.

IMC offers a tiered set of student and graduate programmes feeding into its Amsterdam, Chicago, Sydney and Mumbai offices:

• Launchpad: a two-day discovery programme for second-year students in software engineering and quantitative trading.
• Women in Trading & Technology: a one-day EU event for high-achieving women students.
• UK Masterclass: a UK-only programme covering trading and technology.
• Accelerate: a new programme launching in 2026 for university students.
• Trading and Technology Internships: 10-week summer programmes (EU late June to August; US mid-June to mid-August; APAC across the Australian summer; India nine weeks from July).
• Graduate Traineeship: three to six weeks of training split across four named schools (Trading School, Development School, FPGA School, Analyst School) before placement on a local desk.

The stack means second-years can route through Launchpad into an internship into the Graduate Traineeship, so missing a target year at the entry rung narrows, but does not close, the path to a full-time seat.

The firm remains privately held and employee-led, which it cites alongside Optiver and Flow Traders as the structural identity of the Amsterdam market-making cluster. The Graduate Traineeship is unusual in routing every full-time hire through four named schools (Trading, Development, FPGA, Analyst) regardless of starting desk, giving engineers, traders and quants a shared technical baseline before specialisation. For an applicant choosing between proprietary trading firms, IMC's distinctive offer is options market-making depth in a private partnership structure rather than the listed-firm or hedge-fund alternatives, and a cross-disciplinary first six weeks rather than immediate desk placement.