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Campus AI Research Engineer (Intern)

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 you had to explain a technical tradeoff to someone who wasn't an engineer, like a trader or a researcher. How did you handle it?

ability to communicate with non-engineers, since this role sits between research and trading teams

Give me an example of a research idea you had that didn't pan out. What told you it was time to stop?

intellectual honesty and judgment about when to cut losses on a line of work

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate about a technical approach. What happened?

how the candidate handles conflict in a competitive, high-caliber team environment

Describe a time you had to pick up a language or tool you weren't strong in because the project demanded it. How fast did you get productive?

adaptability across the C, C++, Python, CUDA stack this role requires

Technical

Walk me through a project where you trained a model on a dataset too big to fit comfortably in memory or on a single GPU. What broke first and how did you fix it?

whether the candidate has hands-on experience with real scaling constraints, not just toy datasets

Tell me about a time you wrote CUDA, Triton, or another low-level GPU kernel instead of relying on a library. Why was the library not good enough?

depth of actual GPU programming experience versus surface familiarity with the term

How would you go about cutting inference latency in half for a model that's already in production, without retraining it?

knowledge of inference optimization techniques like quantization, batching, or kernel fusion

Describe the difference between how you'd design a training system versus a low-latency inference system. What tradeoffs change?

whether the candidate understands the distinct engineering demands of research versus production ML

What's a piece of PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow internals that most people misunderstand, and how did you learn it the hard way?

whether framework knowledge goes past the API surface into how things actually execute

What does observability mean to you in the context of a large ML system, and what would you actually want to monitor?

whether the candidate thinks about production systems holistically, not just model accuracy

Situational

Say you have a training pipeline that's spending 40 percent of its time waiting on data loading instead of doing GPU compute. How would you find that bottleneck and what would you try first?

practical understanding of profiling and pipeline optimization rather than just theoretical knowledge

Suppose a quant researcher hands you a model that works great in their notebook but you need to get it into a production system with strict latency requirements. What's your first move?

ability to bridge the gap between exploratory research code and production-grade systems

If you were told an HPC cluster's GPU utilization was sitting at 50 percent across a research team's jobs, how would you investigate and where would you look first?

systems thinking about shared resource efficiency and debugging at scale

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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="1" 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="1" 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="1" 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="1" 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="1" 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="1" 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="1" 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="2" 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="2" 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="2" 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="2" 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="2" 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="2" 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="2" 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="2" 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 (annualized) is $300,000 per year.

Apply at Jump Trading

Campus AI Research Engineer (Intern)

Likely interview questions for this role

Practice this interview out loud.

The full job description

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