2018–2026 IMC SWE New Grad OA / Interviews: 58 Experiences (Part 1 :)

A practical map of IMC New Grad software interviews, built from 58 firsthand candidate reports.

Coverage: SWE, SDE, Graduate Software Engineer, and Graduate Software Developer · OA, recorded video, recruiter screen, technical screen, and onsite · United States, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Australia, Canada, and reports without a stated location · 2018 through September 2026

The short version

IMC changes the questions, but the same skills keep coming back: careful simulation, custom data structures, clear explanations, and code that survives awkward edge cases.

1. Many recent OAs used two hours and two coding problems. The reports often pair one graph or path problem with one custom data-structure or simulation problem.
2. A small set repeats a lot. Busy Intersection, Avoiding Monsters, the perfect-square path problem, Adding Stack, and the knight-with-bishop problem account for many independent reports.
3. The video round is not just behavioral. Candidates were asked to explain binary search or a stack to a nontechnical person, compare threads, discuss cache policies, and defend complexity claims.
4. Later rounds become more practical. Matching engines, order cancellation, debugging supplied code, OOP work, and hotel-reservation design show up after the OA.
5. The prompt may be incomplete. Several candidates had to clarify output rules, tie-breaking, missing constraints, or a broken example before they could code.
6. Old reports are still useful, but start with the recent set. The 2024–2026 process is the best guide to today's loop. The older reports explain why the same data-structure families keep returning.

A practical prep order: current OA pair → repeated simulations → custom stacks → explain one CS idea out loud → matching-engine practice → behavioral stories.

How the count works

The 58 reports are independent New Grad or Graduate software candidates with at least one usable question or task. A repost, mirror, or follow-up from the same application counts once. Intern, quant, hardware, systems-engineering, and experienced-hire reports are not included.

When a report says only “a graph question” or “three CS questions,” this article keeps that gap. It does not guess the missing prompt.

The coding questions that repeat

Dates below are report dates. When independent candidates reported the same question more than once, every known date is listed.

01: Busy Intersection — 21 reports

Reported on: 2023-10-10; 2023-08-31; 2023-08-29; 2023-08-15; 2023-08-13; 2023-08-12; 2023-08-10 (2 reports); 2023-08-09; 2023-08-06; 2023-08-05; 2022-10-07; 2022-09-28; 2022-09-23; 2022-09-22; 2022-09-11; 2022-09-08; 2022-09-02 (2 reports); 2022-08-24; 2022-08-17.

Busy Intersection is the biggest repeat in this set.

Cars wait on two one-way streets. Only one car crosses each second. If a street used the intersection in the previous second, it keeps priority. After an idle second, First Avenue gets priority. The hard part is not the two queues. It is handling time gaps, cars arriving together, stable input order, and the reset after an idle period.

Several candidates timed out by moving the clock one second at a time. The useful fix was to jump straight to the next arrival when both queues were empty.

02: Avoiding Monsters — 14 reports

Reported on: 2023-10-10; 2023-08-31; 2023-08-29; 2023-08-17; 2023-08-15; 2023-08-13; 2023-08-12; 2023-08-11; 2023-08-10 (2 reports); 2023-08-09; 2023-08-08; 2023-08-06; 2023-08-05.

Avoiding the Obstacles asks for a path whose closest monster is as far away as possible.

The repeated approach was:

1. Run multi-source BFS from every monster.
2. Turn each cell into its distance from the nearest monster.
3. Find a path that maximizes the minimum value along the route.

Candidates used a max-heap path search, binary search plus reachability, or union-find in distance order. Multiple reports mention timeouts or hidden cases after a plain DFS.

03: Perfect-square path — 10 reports

Reported on: 2022-10-07; 2022-09-28; 2022-09-23; 2022-09-22; 2022-09-11; 2022-09-08; 2022-09-02 (2 reports); 2022-08-24; 2022-08-17.

Reaching Points with Perfect-Square Obstacles was the main 2022 OA family.

The point can move by adding one coordinate to the other, or by adding a fixed positive value to both coordinates. A point is blocked when its coordinate sum is a perfect square. Reports disagree on a few cropped details, but they agree that endpoints and the extra diagonal move matter.

04: Adding Stack — 9 reports

Reported on: 2026-06-10; 2024-04-13; 2023-10-15; 2023-09-01; 2022-02-25; 2021-08-01; 2021-05-11; 2020-12-22; 2020-10-01.

The stack appeared in more than one form:

1. Adding Stack with Top Values reports the top value after each push, pop, or bottom-k increment.
2. Adding Stack 2.0 keeps a running sum in constant time.

The key idea is lazy propagation: store pending increments at the deepest affected position, then pass them downward when popping. A normal loop over the bottom k values is too slow.

05: Knight and bishop — 6 reports

Reported on: 2023-10-15; 2023-09-01; 2022-02-25; 2021-08-01; 2020-12-01; 2020-10-01.

Knight Minimum Moves with a Capturable Bishop adds one bishop to a shortest-knight-path problem.

The knight must avoid attacked landing cells while the bishop is alive. Some reports explicitly allow the knight to capture the bishop, after which the diagonal attacks disappear. BFS still works, but the state must reflect whether the bishop has been captured.

06: Relay towers and water level — 4 reports

Reported on: 2026-08-17; 2025-09-14; 2024-11-14; 2024-10-12.

Rock Jumping combines a threshold with reachability. In newer wording, relay towers below the storm level cannot be used, and jumps consume energy based on squared distance. Older wording uses rocks and a water level.

The common shape is: choose a threshold, keep only usable points, then test whether the destination is reachable under the movement budget.

07: Stack Batch Removal — 4 reports

Reported on: 2026-08-17; 2025-09-14; 2024-11-14; 2024-10-12.

Stack Batch Removal supports push and pop plus commands that remove every value below or above a threshold. The stack order must stay valid, and the top or EMPTY is reported after each command.

Candidates who scanned the whole stack for every removal ran into time limits. The prompt is really asking for a data structure that can defer or batch the removals.

08: House Valuation — 4 reports

Reported on: 2023-09-11; 2023-08-17; 2023-08-11; 2023-08-08.

House Valuation removes price outliers among houses with the same area, then estimates the price for a requested area by averaging, interpolation, or extrapolation.

One reported bug was including the current house in its own outlier comparison. Reports also warn about rounding, clamping the final price, and handling an area group that becomes empty after filtering.

Other concrete questions

1. 2026-08-28 — Grid Paths with Override Passes: move right or down through a binary grid and spend a limited number of passes on blocked cells.
2. 2026-08-04 and 2025-11-28 — Choose Containers: pick the package set with the least total wasted space; reject a set that cannot fit the largest order.
3. 2026-08-04 — Chain of Command: answer recipient-position queries in a sorted-child depth-first traversal of an organization tree.
4. 2026-05-20 and 2024-05-17 — Matching Engine with Order Cancellation: match orders, preserve price-time priority, and delete an existing order efficiently.
5. 2024-01-29 — Queued Seats: repeatedly assign a preferred seat or move the person to the back with an incremented preference.
6. 2020-11-24 and 2020-08-01 — Hidden Artifacts: count fully and partly discovered rectangles on a searched grid.
7. 2025-09-20 — A matrix problem about minimizing a difference. The source does not preserve enough rules to identify the task.
8. 2025-09-20 — A tree-traversal problem from different starting nodes. The source names the technique but not the full contract.

Later-round builds and design work

1. 2026-05-20 and 2024-05-17 — Matching engine. Two reports describe implementation work, and one adds a direct follow-up: what data structure keeps orders sorted by price and then arrival time while still supporting fast cancellation?
2. 2025-12-18 and 2022-02-25 — Hotel reservation prompts. One video prompt asked for an in-memory hotel system. The older prompt asked about list trade-offs and another data structure for hotel reservations. This guided LLD exercise keeps the shared domain and labels the extra practice assumptions.
3. 2025-10-27 — OOP assessment. One Chicago report says the first HackerRank round was object-oriented, but it does not preserve the classes or required behavior.
4. 2024-05-17 — Debugging round. A Mumbai report put candidates in small groups, gave them code, and asked them to find the bug and propose a fix.

Fast verbal questions

These are short, but they are not filler. The interviewer wants a clear answer and a reason.

1. 2025-10-27 — When is LFU a better cache policy than LRU? Explain it simply.
2. 2025-12-18 and 2020-10-01 — Can a multithreaded algorithm be slower than a single-threaded one? Why?
3. 2021-05-18 — Give a real-world example of recursion. What can go wrong, and how would you improve it?
4. 2022-10-01 and 2022-08-18 — Explain binary search to someone without a technical background.
5. 2023-09-01 — Explain a stack to someone without a technical background.
6. 2020-08-01 — Discuss quicksort's speed and worst case.
7. 2021-05-18 — Discuss linked-list operations and complexity. The exact operation was not preserved.
8. 2018-04-01 — How could an abstract method return either an integer or a floating-point value? The source does not preserve the language or expected answer.
9. 2025-12-18 — What are the worst-case costs of common array, hash-table, and min-heap operations?
10. 2020-08-01 — Design a library interface. The source does not preserve the library domain or method list.

Behavioral and recruiter questions

1. 2025-09-14 and 2024-09-01 — Tell me about yourself.
2. 2025-09-14, 2025-09-06, 2024-09-01, 2022-09-02, and 2020-10-01 — Why IMC, and why software in trading?
3. 2025-10-27 — Tell me about a time you worked on a team.
4. 2020-08-01 — Describe an influential senior colleague or mentor.
5. 2022-09-02 — When do you graduate, and when can you start?
6. 2022-09-02 — What is your GPA?
7. 2022-09-02 — Have you interviewed with IMC before?
8. 2025-09-14 and 2022-09-02 — Are you willing to relocate, and do you need sponsorship?
9. 2022-09-02 — What other interviews or offers do you have? What are the deadlines?
10. 2022-09-02 — Why finance or trading technology instead of a conventional technology company?
11. 2022-09-02 — What matters most when you compare offers: work, learning, culture, location, or work-life balance?

Reports 01–18: 2024–2026

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