Software Engineer Intern - C++, Summer 2027
Akuna Capital
| Company | Akuna Capital |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | Chicago |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Intern |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 13 Jul 2026 |
| Last verified | 2 Aug 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (greenhouse) |
Description
About Akuna
Akuna Capital is an innovative trading firm with a strong focus on collaboration, cutting-edge technology, data-driven solutions, and automation. We specialize in providing liquidity on a variety of exchanges across various asset classes, primarily as an options market maker. To do this successfully, we build and maintain our own low-latency technologies, including application frameworks, trading strategies, and mathematical models.
Our Founding Partners first conceptualized Akuna in their hometown of Sydney, Australia. They opened the firm’s first office in 2011 in the heart of the derivatives industry and the options capital of the world – Chicago. Today, Akuna is proud to operate from additional offices around the world: Sydney, Shanghai, Singapore, and London.
What you’ll do as a C++ Software Engineer Intern at Akuna:
C++ software engineer interns at Akuna have the opportunity to work on a variety of high-performance systems that power the firm’s core business operations. Our interns are embedded on small-to-medium-sized teams that frequently interface with Quant and Trading, allowing them to focus on a specific domain area while still experiencing the day-to-day life of an Akuna software engineer. Akuna’s C++ systems are heavily multithreaded, asynchronous, and distributed by nature, which comes with a slew of challenges; our engineers are tasked with ensuring these systems are reliable, efficient, scalable, and flexible enough for even the most niche use cases.
Over their 10-week Akunacademy experience, software engineer interns will work on one or more valuable projects, progressing from ideation and design all the way to delivery and maintenance. These projects range from adding functionality onto existing systems to implementing brand new componentry to experimenting with new technologies and patterns to better understand the solution space. Akuna is looking for software engineer interns who are motivated, can solve complex problems, and are willing to reach for creative solutions when faced with novel problems. We value innovation, hard work, and knowledge, and we want our engineer interns to make a direct impact on the firm. Whether you are interested in algorithms and data structures, concurrency, networking and protocols, performance tuning, data capture and analysis, mathematical modeling, hardware, or something else, there’s engaging work to be done.
Requirements for This Role
Pursuing a bachelor’s, master’s, or Ph.D. in a technical field (computer science/engineering, math, physics, or equivalent)
Graduating by August 2028
Legal authorization to work in the U.S. as of the first day of employment, including F-1 students using OPT or STEM
Previous experience in finance or trading is not required. Many of our engineers joined Akuna with little-to-no prior knowledge of the markets, and we pride ourselves on our ability to onboard those new to the industry. Training and continuous education are provided for all engineers to ensure they can build the requisite technical and non-technical skillset for success.
Qualities That Make a Great C++ Software Engineer Candidate
Experience programming in modern C++ (C++20 or later; C++23 preferred)
Experience with several of the following
Distributed systems
Parallel processing
Asynchronous architectures
Networking or protocol encoding/decoding
Lock-free data structures and algorithms
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