JobsJump Trading

Campus Software Engineer (Intern)

Jump Trading · Chicago, IL · Core Development

Posted Aug 8, 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

Walk me through a project where you built something low-level from scratch instead of using an existing library. Why did you choose to do it that way?

whether the candidate genuinely enjoys building from first principles versus assembling components, which the posting explicitly values

Tell me about a time you had to learn a new area quickly, like networking or compilers, in order to finish a project. What did you do first?

ability and appetite to reach across hardware, networking, and OS layers as the role requires

Describe a project where you had to ship working code on a tight deadline as part of a team. What was your role and what happened when something broke?

comfort operating in a fast-paced, daily-deployment environment

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate about how to design or implement something. How did you resolve it?

collaboration style and intellectual honesty in a team that says it values mutual respect and directness

What draws you to working on a large-scale distributed trading system specifically, given you don't need a finance background for this role?

genuine motivation and fit versus applying just for the compensation or brand name

Technical

Tell me about the last multithreaded program you wrote in C++ or Python. What kind of concurrency bugs did you run into and how did you find them?

real hands-on experience with threading models, not just textbook knowledge

Suppose you have a shared queue being read and written by multiple threads with strict latency requirements. How would you design the synchronization so it stays fast under contention?

depth of understanding of low-latency concurrent data structures, a core need for a trading platform

How does memory get allocated and reclaimed on a Linux system, and why might that matter if you're trying to avoid unpredictable pauses in a program?

understanding of OS internals and how they connect to performance, which the posting calls out directly

Explain the difference between a stack and a heap allocation and give me a case where choosing one over the other actually changed how your program behaved.

solid grounding in data structures and memory fundamentals

Have you used any AI coding tools like Claude Code in real projects? Walk me through a time one of them gave you a wrong or subtly broken suggestion and how you caught it.

whether the candidate uses AI tools critically rather than blindly trusting output, since agentic tools are central to this team

Situational

If I gave you a piece of code that is correct but too slow, how would you go about figuring out where the time is actually going before changing anything?

disciplined performance debugging habits rather than guessing at optimizations

Imagine you're a few weeks into a ten-week internship and your mentor gives you a piece of production code you don't fully understand, with a deadline in three days. What do you do?

how the candidate handles ambiguity and asks for help versus struggling silently

If your code passed all its tests but was still causing intermittent failures once deployed, how would you track down what's going on?

systematic debugging approach for issues that only appear in production-like conditions

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The full job description

As published by Jump Trading.

<p data-renderer-start-pos="1448">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.</p> <p data-renderer-start-pos="1448">Core Development is a global team of technologists who lean into the cutting edge of agentic development to architect, build and maintain our world-class trading platform From optimizing our core trading engine to building custom hardware, we leverage the latest agentic tools to deliver the infrastructure that drives our trading and business needs.</p> <p><strong>What You’ll Do:</strong></p> <p>Our software engineering internship is an intensive 10-week experience with our technology team that designs, codes, tests, and maintains our distributed trading system and one of the world’s largest supercomputers.</p> <p>You will be working side by side with our experienced software engineers and will receive ongoing coaching from a dedicated mentor throughout the summer. Our internship program is the primary way we identify top young software engineers for our core development team, and it’s a proven path for earning full-time opportunities at Jump.&nbsp;</p> <p>Over the course of the summer, you will take on projects working on production code and gain experience with our full-cycle process for development, testing, and release using Agile methodologies. You will apply your programming and analysis skills to contribute to our real-time large-scale, high-performance trading platform and related infrastructure.&nbsp;</p> <p>Other duties as assigned or needed</p> <p><strong>Skills You’ll Need:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Hands-on experience and a high level of proficiency in one or more of the following:</li> <ul> <li>C++ development on Linux platform</li> <li>Python development on Linux platform</li> </ul> <li>Strong understanding of data structures and threading models</li> <li>Ability to work with a team in a fast-paced environment, deploying new software daily</li> <li>Passion for solving complex problems and learning to build optimal solutions from scratch, instead of simply assembling things from existing libraries</li> <li>Interest in using knowledge from several areas -- such as hardware, networking, OS design -- to produce extremely high-performance software&nbsp;</li> <li>Reliable and predictable availability&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>Also Helpful, but Not Required:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Past internship or job experience in a software development role is a plus</li> <li>Advanced coursework in algorithms, network programming, operating systems, compilers&nbsp;</li> <li>Experience with AI tools like Claude Code in a real work environment</li> </ul> <p><em>* No finance or economics study or work experience required</em>&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS are encouraged to apply. We accept students eligible for CPT/OPT and we sponsor work visas for full-time positions</p> <p>The estimated base salary for this role is $250,000 per year.</p>

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