IMC interview notes, page 3 of 3

Large Enterprises

Most of these IMC write-ups come from Software Engineers (20), then Machine Learning Engineers (5) and Data Scientists (1). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (18), the online assessment (2), the system design round (2) and the recruiter screen (2).

26 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

IMC·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026

IMC quant engineer OA, HackerRank format, one meaty tree problem about organizational hierarchies. Not the hardest thing I've seen but the query complexity analysis at the end tripped me up a bit.

Given an employee hierarchy represented as a tree or forest, implement a system to answer queries such as: find the manager chain for an employee, find the lowest common manager of two employees, and compute the total number of reports under a given manager. Discuss your build and query time and space complexity.

“I went with DFS and precomputed parent pointers plus subtree sizes during the build phase, which felt right.”

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IMC·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Had a round at IMC for a software engineering role where they asked me to walk through a project as if I were talking to someone with zero technical background. Simpler premise than it sounds.

Walk me through one of your projects as if you were explaining it to someone non-technical. What problem were you solving, how did you solve it, and what was the actual impact?

“I kept wanting to slip into technical terms and caught myself doing it like three times.”

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IMC·Machine Learning Engineer·Take-home Assignment

Jul 2026

IMC ML Engineer interview was a single open-ended coding session on a tabular dataset, covering the full pipeline from EDA through neural net training and overfitting mitigation. No fluff, just build stuff and explain your choices.

Load a tabular dataset and perform exploratory data analysis: summarize feature distributions, find missing values and outliers, and visualize relationships between features and the target variable.
Implement a regularized linear regression model and evaluate it on a held-out test split.
Build and train a small feedforward neural network on the same target, selecting an appropriate loss function, optimizer, and learning rate.
Detect overfitting from training and validation curves, then apply at least two techniques to address it and explain the trade-offs involved.

“Pretty standard starting point but I underestimated how much time to budget here.”

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IMC·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

IMC quant engineer interview, one of those sessions that tests whether you actually think or just pattern-match to memorized answers. This question looked like a simple true/false but had a real gotcha buried in it.

True or false: the time complexity of binary search on a linked list is O(n log n). Explain your reasoning.

“I said true and walked through the math: binary search runs log n iterations, each random access on a linked list costs O(n), so you get O(n log n).”

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IMC·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Did a technical screen for a Quant Engineer role at IMC. One coding problem, felt pretty algorithmic in nature, and the interviewer clarified the spec partway through which was actually helpful.

Given a stream of events where each event has a timestamp, a category, and a quantity, compute the running 'reduction' metric over time. Recycled quantities count positive, waste quantities count negative. Return either the maximum reduction reached at any point, or the full running series, depending on what the interviewer asks.

“The problem sounds vague at first and I spent probably too long trying to figure out what 'reduction' meant before just asking.”

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IMC·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

IMC data scientist interview with a probability question that looks clean on the surface but requires you to actually set up the geometry carefully. One question, not a lot of fluff.

X and Y are independent uniform random variables on [0,1]. Let L be the larger of the two and S the smaller. What is P(L² > S)?

“I stared at this for a bit because writing it in terms of max and min felt clunky.”

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