Database Engineer

At IMC, technology is not a department; it's at the heart of everything we do. Developed in-house, our innovative software and infrastructure make millions of trading decisions daily, and we win by making better and faster decisions than our competition.
IMC's Amsterdam-based infrastructure teams design and operate the critical systems that power our global trading operations. We're now creating a dedicated Database Engineering team to take ownership of our core database infrastructure, starting with Postgres on Kubernetes and expanding into a broader strategic role across our stack. This is an opportunity to shape the foundation of a new team and provide essential services to engineering, research, and trading teams across IMC.
Your Core Responsibilities:
As a Database Engineer, you'll play a key role in creating a high-performance, scalable, and reliable data layer for our internal platforms. You'll collaborate closely with infrastructure, storage, and application teams to design, optimize, and operate the next generation of IMC's database systems. You'll be part of a growing team that brings deep systems thinking to the database space, working on everything from Linux-level performance tuning to tooling, automation, and monitoring.
Your core tasks will include:

• Taking ownership of IMC's Postgres infrastructure on Kubernetes, focusing on performance tuning, scaling, and ensuring availability.
• Engineering solutions to support a variety of database technologies, including RDBMS, Columnar and time-series databases.
• Collaborating with internal storage and infra teams to optimize for hardware and system-level performance, disk subsystems, and memory management.
• Designing and implementing backup and recovery strategies, observability, and database lifecycle management.
• Mentoring a junior engineer and helping build the foundation of a new team with potential for future growth.

Your Skills and Experience:

• 8+ years of experience in Database Engineering, Systems Engineering, or Infrastructure roles, ideally with some prior experience as a DBA.
• Postgres expertise is essential, particularly in production environments, with experience in configuration, tuning, and troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, particularly running and managing databases in Kubernetes environments.
• Professional experience with broader database technologies, including RDBMS (ideally including Postgres), NoSQL, Columnar, and time-series databases.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge, particularly around performance optimization, resource management, and low-level tuning of the platform for databases.
• Experience working with Python automation for deploying and maintaining infrastructure. You should be comfortable with basic scripting and automation tasks. Familiarity with Python or Java DB access libraries will be beneficial.
• A practical mindset with the ability to work across technical boundaries, particularly with Storage, Kubernetes, and Platform Engineering teams.
• Ability to gather requirements from internal stakeholders, translate them into solutions, and deliver them in complex environments.
• Previous leadership experience or the ability to mentor and manage others is highly valued.
• Nice to haves are familiarity with automation and infrastructure management tools like Airflow, ArgoCD, Kustomize, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Relevant additional information:

• This is a brand-new team we're building with an immediate need to hire a junior engineer who will report to you and a strong strategic focus and offering you the opportunity to manage and grow a team right from the start.
• The role will involve significant collaboration with internal teams like Data Platform (DP) and Data Dev (DD), as well as Platform Engineering, Storage, and Kubernetes teams.
• You will report directly to the Data Engineering Lead and will be part of the Database sub team within Data Engineering.
• Travel to other IMC offices (Chicago, Mumbai, Sydney) may be required occasionally. Not guaranteed.

About Us
IMC is a global trading firm powered by a cutting-edge research environment and a world-class technology backbone. Since 1989, we've been a stabilizing force in financial markets, providing essential liquidity upon which market participants depend. Across our offices in the US, Europe, Asia Pacific, and India, our talented quant researchers, engineers, traders, and business operations professionals are united by our uniquely collaborative, high-performance culture, and our commitment to giving back. From entering dynamic new markets to embracing disruptive technologies, and from developing an innovative research environment to diversifying our trading strategies, we dare to continuously innovate and collaborate to succeed.