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Campus AI Research Engineer (Full-Time)

Jump Trading · Chicago, IL · Front Office

Posted Aug 18, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

Behavioral

Tell me about a time your model or system worked in research but failed or behaved differently once it hit production. What was different and how did you catch it?

awareness of the research-to-production gap and whether they build with production constraints in mind from the start

Tell me about a disagreement you had with a researcher or trader about how a model should be built or deployed. How did you resolve it?

how they handle friction with non-engineer stakeholders who have strong opinions and financial stakes

Tell me about a time you had to learn a new framework, language, or piece of low-level hardware knowledge quickly to finish a project. How did you approach it?

self-motivation and learning speed given the role covers a wide range of unfamiliar tools

Explain, as if to a trader with no ML background, what a transformer model is doing when it makes a prediction.

communication skill and ability to make technical work legible to non-technical stakeholders

Technical

Walk me through a project where you had to squeeze more performance out of a training pipeline. What was the bottleneck and how did you find it?

whether the candidate can actually profile and diagnose real performance problems, not just quote theoretical throughput numbers

Tell me about a time you wrote CUDA, Triton, or another low-level GPU kernel. What made hand-written code necessary instead of relying on existing library calls?

real hands-on depth in GPU programming versus surface familiarity with the names

How would you design an inference system for a model that has to return predictions in microseconds rather than milliseconds?

understanding of latency-sensitive system design, including memory layout, batching tradeoffs, and language choice

Describe the largest dataset you've trained on, in terms of size and format. What broke first when you scaled up from something smaller?

whether claimed experience with hundreds of TBs of data is genuine or exaggerated

How do you decide when to write something in C++ versus Python for a given piece of an ML system?

practical judgment about performance versus development speed tradeoffs rather than dogmatic language preference

What would you build into an ML system to make it observable, so that when something silently degrades, someone notices quickly?

whether they think about monitoring, logging, and failure modes proactively, not just accuracy metrics

Situational

Say you have a PyTorch training job that's supposed to use a multi-GPU cluster efficiently but GPU utilization is sitting at 40 percent. How would you go about figuring out why?

structured debugging instinct for distributed training, and familiarity with tools like nsight, profilers, or nccl diagnostics

A quant researcher comes to you with a model that works in a notebook but takes six hours to retrain, and they want it retrained daily. What do you do first?

ability to translate a research artifact into a maintainable pipeline and prioritize fixes

If you had a week of research iteration time and a colleague suggested a change that would double iteration speed but might introduce subtle numerical differences, what would you do?

judgment about tradeoffs between speed and correctness in a research environment where small errors can be costly

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The full job description

As published by Jump Trading.

Jump Trading Group is committed to world class research. We empower exceptional talents in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to seek scientific boundaries, push through them, and apply cutting edge research to global financial markets. Our culture is unique. Constant innovation requires fearlessness, creativity, intellectual honesty, and a relentless competitive streak. We believe in winning together and unlocking unique individual talent by incenting collaboration and mutual respect. At Jump, research outcomes drive more than superior risk adjusted returns. We design, develop, and deploy technologies that change our world, fund start-ups across industries, and partner with leading global research organizations and universities to solve problems. Our trading teams are each comprised of a dynamic group of traders, quantitative researchers, and engineers who work together to examine the global markets, seeking to understand the complexities of various traded products and exchanges. They leverage their impeccable statistical analysis and data mining skills, using the results of their research to make forecasts and develop profitable predictive trading models. We are seeking world-class engineers to collaborate with our research, trading, and engineering teams to build state-of-the-art ML systems that solve some of the most complex problems in quantitative finance. Whether optimizing training pipelines on high-performance computing clusters, developing low-latency inference systems, or pushing the boundaries of AI research from concept to production, you'll have the opportunity to work on impactful projects in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. If you are driven by technical challenges, eager to work with large-scale systems, and passionate about advancing AI/ML capabilities, we want to meet you.  What You'll Do:  <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">Apply state-of-the-art techniques to complex and challenging domains. </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Work closely with researchers and quants to build flexible and reusable frameworks for financial AI/ML. </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="1">Optimize training pipelines to make the best use of our HPC resources. </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="4" data-aria-level="1">Integrate AI/ML models into production systems where latency matters. </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="5" data-aria-level="1">Work across a mix of programming languages: C / C++ / Python / CUDA and other low-level GPU languages. </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="6" data-aria-level="1">Build large-scale AI/ML systems that are observable, performant, and flexible. Help improve productivity by reducing the iteration cycle time on research. </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="7" data-aria-level="1">Other duties as assigned or needed. </li> </ul>   Skills You'll Need:  This role covers a wide range of potential projects and skills. We don't expect everyone to have all of these, but for the applicable areas we are looking for deep technical expertise.  <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">Creative thinkers who are driven, self-motivated, and eager to solve challenging problems </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Proficiency in Python and/or C++ </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="1">Proficiency in PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, and/or similar frameworks </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="4" data-aria-level="1">Ability to thrive in a collaborative, team-oriented environment </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="5" data-aria-level="1">Expertise in GPU or accelerator programming (CUDA, Triton, SYCL, ROCm, or equivalent) </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="6" data-aria-level="1">Experience building AI/ML systems at scale (hundreds of TBs of training data, low-latency or high-throughput inference requirements) </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="7" data-aria-level="1">Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English </li> </ul> <ul> <li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="8" data-aria-level="1">Reliable and predictable availability </li> </ul>   INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS are encouraged to apply. We accept students eligible for CPT/OPT and we sponsor work visas for full-time positions.  The estimated base salary for this role is $300,000 per year. <hr> Benefits    - Discretionary bonus eligibility    - Medical, dental, and vision insurance    - HSA, FSA, and Dependent Care options    - Employer Paid Group Term Life and AD&D Insurance    - Voluntary Life & AD&D insurance    - Paid vacation plus paid holidays    - Retirement plan with employer match    - Paid parental leave    - Wellness Programs

Apply at Jump Trading

Campus AI Research Engineer (Full-Time)

Likely interview questions for this role

Practice this interview out loud.

The full job description

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