How to Apply to IG Group

Key Takeaways

IG Group Holdings plc is a FTSE 250 UK-headquartered online retail trading platform listed on the LSE under ticker IGG, with Cannon Bridge House in London as headquarters and roughly 2,500 employees globally.
The firm was founded in 1974 by Stuart Wheeler, who passed away in 2020. Breon Corcoran (formerly CEO of Paddy Power Betfair) became CEO in June 2022 and has emphasised operational discipline.
IG owns tastytrade, the US options-trading platform acquired in 2021 for approximately USD 1 billion. tastytrade is the cornerstone of the US strategy and is run with material operating independence from Chicago.
Products include CFDs, UK spread betting, listed options, FX, share dealing, and a stocks-and-shares ISA. Competitors include Plus500, CMC Markets, Saxo Bank, OANDA, Pepperstone, eToro, Interactive Brokers, and Charles Schwab.
All hiring runs through Workday at careers.iggroup.com. tastytrade roles in the US sometimes carry separate brand surfaces but generally flow into the same Workday backend.
FCA Senior Manager and Certification Regime status, FINRA registration, ASIC RG146, and equivalent regional regulatory statuses are screened structurally. State them clearly in the CV and Workday fields.
Compensation is competitive within UK financial-services tech and front-office trading, with a base-plus-discretionary-bonus structure capped under MiFID II for in-scope staff and LTIP grants in IGG shares for senior roles.
The Krakow office in Poland is the largest engineering hub outside London. The technology stack includes Java, .NET, C++, Python, React, TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, Kafka, Kubernetes, and a hybrid AWS and on-premise estate.
Interviews are structured, technically rigorous, and culturally serious about the products. Opening a demo account before the interview is read as a meaningful signal of motivation.
Hybrid working is genuinely flexible in most non-trading roles, typically two to three days in the office per week. Final-stage interviews are typically held in person at Cannon Bridge House London or the relevant regional office.

About IG Group

IG Group Holdings plc, listed on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker IGG and a constituent of the FTSE 250, is one of the world's largest online retail trading platforms. Headquartered at Cannon Bridge House on Cannon Street in the City of London, the firm employs roughly 2,500 people globally and reported revenue of approximately GBP 950 million in its 2024 financial year. The business provides leveraged trading on contracts for difference (CFDs), UK spread betting, options, foreign exchange, and an unleveraged share-dealing and stocks-and-shares ISA proposition through the IG.com retail platform. It also serves professional and institutional traders through its Pro account programme and white-label and API offerings, and it operates the tastytrade business in the United States, the options-trading platform IG acquired in 2021 for approximately USD 1 billion. Together these brands serve clients in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Australia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Japan, and the United States. IG was founded in 1974 by Stuart Wheeler, a Cambridge-educated entrepreneur and one of the most distinctive figures in modern UK financial services, who built the firm from a single product (a spread bet on the gold price, which had become tradable for British investors after the abolition of exchange controls) into the dominant UK retail trading franchise. Wheeler, who later became a prominent political donor and public figure before passing away in 2020, set the cultural tone of the company: technically curious, product-led, and willing to take a contrarian commercial position. The business listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2000, demutualised through several waves of growth in the 2000s, and expanded into Australia, Singapore, and continental Europe as MiFID, MiFID II, and equivalent regimes opened the leveraged retail-derivatives market across jurisdictions. The leadership context shapes the hiring environment. Breon Corcoran, formerly chief executive of Paddy Power Betfair, became chief executive of IG Group in June 2022, succeeding June Felix. Corcoran's brief is to extend the operational discipline that he is known for in the gambling and online platforms world to a regulated retail-trading business that has historically run at high margin but faces sustained pressure from regulators on leverage limits, marketing standards, and best execution. The 2021 acquisition of tastytrade, the Chicago-headquartered options brokerage and education business founded by Tom Sosnoff and Kristi Ross, was the largest deal in the firm's history and remains the cornerstone of the US strategy. tastytrade brought a US broker-dealer entity, a self-clearing capability, and a distinctive media-led education franchise into the group, alongside a passionate retail options community. Competitively, IG sits in a fragmented but high-stakes peer set. Its closest like-for-like competitors are Plus500 (Israeli-founded, LSE-listed), CMC Markets (Australian-founded, LSE-listed), and the UK arms of Saxo Bank, OANDA, and Pepperstone. In the US options market, tastytrade competes principally with Interactive Brokers, Charles Schwab's thinkorswim platform, Robinhood, and Webull. In the wider European and global retail-trading market, eToro, XTB, Trading 212, and Revolut Trading have changed the competitive dynamics by combining low-cost brokerage with social and mobile experiences. IG's defensive moat is a mature, deeply engineered, regulated trading platform with multi-asset coverage, professional-grade execution, and one of the most respected dealing and risk teams in the retail sector. Its growth ambition rests on US options through tastytrade, on professional and institutional flows, on growing the share-dealing and ISA franchise in the UK, and on selectively entering or deepening its presence in jurisdictions where the regulatory regime is rational. The regulatory environment is non-negotiable context for any candidate. IG entities are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the United Kingdom, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in Australia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore in Singapore, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and the Prudential Authority in South Africa, BaFin in Germany, the Financial Services Agency in Japan, the Dubai Financial Services Authority in the UAE, and the appropriate US regulators (CFTC, NFA, FINRA, SEC and state-level equivalents) for the tastytrade entities. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) intervention measures of 2018 and the corresponding FCA rules, which capped leverage on retail CFDs, restricted incentives, and required negative balance protection, reshaped the economics of retail leveraged trading; subsequent UK and EU consultations on a possible CFD ban or further restrictions remain a live commercial risk. Working at IG means being comfortable with the reality that the firm's products are politically contested in some jurisdictions and that compliance is not a back-office function but a first-order commercial constraint. The technology estate is one of the firm's strongest selling points to engineering candidates. The trading platform is built around high-performance market-data, pricing, and order-routing services with components in Java, .NET, and C++ for the latency-sensitive paths, alongside React and TypeScript on the web client, native iOS and Android on mobile, Python for data and quantitative tooling, and Kafka, Kubernetes, and a hybrid AWS and on-premise estate underpinning the whole. The Krakow office in Poland is the largest engineering hub outside London and runs material parts of the platform, dealing and risk systems, and data engineering. Hybrid working is genuinely available in most non-trading roles. Compensation is competitive within UK financial-services tech and the dealing and trading function is paid on a base-plus-bonus structure that, in strong years, materially exceeds the equivalent technology base.

ATS System: Workday Recruiting (IG Group tenant)

IG Group runs a Workday Recruiting tenant for substantially all corporate, engineering, dealing, risk, compliance, and commercial hiring across the London Cannon Street headquarters, the Krakow engineering hub, the Sydney APAC office, the Singapore APAC office, the Chicago tastytrade office, and the smaller offices in Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, Dubai, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. The candidate-facing entry point is careers.iggroup.com, which resolves to the IG Workday tenant. tastytrade roles in the US are sometimes posted under the tastytrade brand on a dedicated careers page but generally flow into the same Workday recruiting backend with a tastytrade business-unit tag. The candidate experience is standard Workday: register an account, upload a CV for parsing, manually correct the parsed Experience, Education, Skills, Languages, and Certifications fields, complete employer-specific screening questions covering right to work in the relevant jurisdiction, regulatory status (FCA SMCR, FINRA, ASIC, MAS as applicable), salary expectations in the local currency, notice period, and source of application, then submit. Workday auto-saves drafts so a half-completed application can be returned to from any device. Status updates are pushed to the Workday inbox and to the registered email address. Recruiters at IG use Workday's filtering tools heavily, so structured-field completeness matters at least as much as the prose of the CV.

Use a single-column, ATS-friendly PDF or .docx CV in a standard font. Avoid tables, text boxes, headers and footers, multi-column layouts, and graphics that Workday's parser will mangle.
After upload, click into every parsed Experience entry and correct the dates, employer name, location, and bullets. Pay particular attention to UK date formats (DD/MM/YYYY), Polish placenames for Krakow-based experience, and US firm names for tastytrade-relevant experience.
Complete the Education, Skills, Languages, and Certifications sections as structured data, not just inside the CV text. Recruiters filter candidates on these fields directly, including for FCA, FINRA, and ASIC qualifications.
Answer every screening question, including the regulatory, right-to-work, and source-of-application fields. Unanswered fields read as low effort and are sometimes used as a tiebreaker at first sift.
Mirror the job description's exact phrasing. If the requisition says 'execution latency,' 'best execution,' or 'spread betting,' use those phrases verbatim in the relevant CV bullets.
Apply to a small, targeted set of roles, not a scattergun list. Workday tracks application volume per candidate and recruiters can see the full list of roles you have submitted to inside the tenant.
Save the CV file with a clean name, for example 'Surname_Forename_CV_2026.pdf'. Avoid version numbers, draft markers, dates of birth, and Russian-doll filenames such as 'CV_final_v3_use_this_one.docx'.
If you applied previously and the role lapsed without an offer, you can re-apply after a reasonable interval (typically six months for the same team). Update the CV materially before resubmitting and explain the new context briefly in the cover letter.

Complete Workday Recruiting (IG Group tenant) Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Interviews at IG Group are structured, technically rigorous, and culturally serious about the products the firm sells.

The pace is professional rather than aggressive. Hiring managers are typically deep practitioners of the role they are hiring for, and the bar is high on technical correctness, regulatory awareness, and demonstrated interest in the actual trading platform. Under Breon Corcoran's leadership, the firm has reinforced its emphasis on operational discipline, evidence-based decision-making, and accountability, and that orientation is visible in interview style. A typical experienced-hire process for an engineering, dealing, risk, compliance, or commercial role runs across three to five conversations. The first is a 30 to 45-minute call with an internal Talent Acquisition partner on Microsoft Teams or Zoom. The recruiter confirms motivation, salary expectations in the local currency, notice period, right-to-work status, and any regulatory considerations including FCA SMCR, FINRA registration, or ASIC equivalents. The second is a competency-and-experience interview with the hiring manager, typically 45 to 60 minutes, structured around concrete situations from the candidate's recent work. The third is a deeper technical or scenario round. For engineering roles this is a coding exercise (live or take-home, depending on the team) followed by a system-design conversation focused on a realistic trading-platform challenge: a market-data fan-out, a low-latency pricing path, a quote-to-trade flow, an order-routing optimisation, or a resilience scenario. For dealing roles this is a markets-knowledge and scenario interview covering risk management of a leveraged book, hedging strategy, market-event response, and best-execution decisions. For risk roles this is a stress-scenario walkthrough on market risk, credit risk, and counterparty exposure. For compliance roles this is a regulatory scenario covering Conduct of Business, Consumer Duty, market abuse, AML, and financial crime. For tastytrade roles in Chicago the equivalent is an options-product interview covering Greeks, volatility, strategy construction, and the broker-dealer regulatory regime. The fourth round is a panel with two or three senior leaders covering broader fit, leadership, and cross-team collaboration. The fifth, when it occurs, is a brief conversation with a member of the executive committee for senior or sensitive roles. Questions to expect include: 'Walk me through the most difficult production incident or trading event you handled in the last 12 months and what the firm took away from it,' 'Describe a situation where you had to challenge a senior colleague on a technical or regulatory point,' 'What is your view on the FCA's evolving stance on retail leveraged products and how should a firm like IG respond,' 'What does Consumer Duty mean for the team you are joining,' and 'Why IG rather than Plus500, CMC Markets, eToro, or Saxo at this point in your career.' The 'why us' question is taken seriously and a generic answer about a great brand will not pass. A strong answer references a specific franchise (the multi-asset trading platform, the share-dealing and ISA proposition, tastytrade and the US options market, the Pro account and institutional offering, the Krakow engineering hub) and articulates honestly why the candidate wants to be at IG specifically during the current strategic phase. Dress code is business or smart-business attire for any final-stage interview at Cannon Bridge House in London or for any client-facing role. Smart-casual is acceptable for engineering rounds in Krakow and for technology rounds in London. The Sydney, Singapore, Chicago, and other regional offices follow local norms but skew towards smart-business for final-stage interviews. The firm offers genuine hybrid working in most non-trading roles, typically two to three days in the office per week, but expects final-stage interviews to be conducted in person where reasonably possible. References and background checks are run by a third-party vendor and cover the standard regulated financial-services battery for the relevant jurisdiction: identity, right-to-work, criminal-record disclosure (DBS or Disclosure Scotland in the UK, equivalent in other jurisdictions), credit history for SMCR and FINRA-relevant roles, the FCA register or FINRA BrokerCheck lookup, professional qualification verification, and three to five years of employment history. For US roles at tastytrade, FINRA U4 and U5 history is verified and fingerprinting is required. Misstatements about regulatory status, employment dates, or qualifications are surfaced here and are dealbreakers. Honest and complete disclosure of any historical issue, including past consumer-credit problems for SMCR or FINRA roles, is strongly preferable to non-disclosure.

What IG Group Looks For

Genuine engagement with the actual IG and tastytrade products, not just an interest in 'fintech'. Candidates who have opened a demo account, used the platform, and can talk about specific product surfaces or workflows are weighted favourably.
Regulatory literacy appropriate to the role. FCA SMCR, MiFID II, Consumer Duty, and Conduct of Business for UK candidates; FINRA, SEC, CFTC, and NFA familiarity for tastytrade candidates; ASIC, MAS, BaFin, JFSA, FSCA, or DFSA awareness for the corresponding regional roles.
Quantified track record: latency, throughput, uptime, and incident reduction for engineering; volume, P&L, hedging effectiveness, and limit utilisation for dealing; loss avoidance, fine reduction, and surveillance coverage for compliance; revenue, retention, and channel coverage for commercial roles.
Strong written English. The firm writes a great deal of internal and external regulated documentation, and CV bullets are read carefully for clarity, concision, and accuracy. Fluent business English is non-negotiable for London roles; additional fluency in Polish is valuable for Krakow, German for Frankfurt, Japanese for Tokyo, Mandarin or Cantonese for selected APAC desks, and Arabic for Dubai.
Comfort with leveraged retail products as a regulated business, including the political and reputational sensitivities. Candidates who treat retail CFDs and spread bets as inherently illegitimate are typically not the right fit, but neither are candidates who lack any awareness of the regulatory and consumer-harm debates around the industry.
Resilience in a tightly regulated, market-driven environment. Trading volumes spike with market events and the platform must remain available; engineering, dealing, risk, and operations teams are expected to handle pressure with discipline rather than drama.
Ownership culture. The firm values people who treat their team's outcomes as their own, surface problems early, and work the practical fix rather than waiting for someone else to do so. The Corcoran-era operational discipline reinforces this expectation.
Cultural fit with a long-tenured, product-led London team. The firm has many employees with a decade or more of service alongside fast-track new hires; arrogance towards either group lands badly. Collegial collaboration with the dealing floor, the engineering teams, and the risk and compliance functions is read carefully.
Right to work in the relevant jurisdiction. UK roles require right to work in the UK, with skilled-worker visa sponsorship available for senior or specialist roles where justified, decided role by role. tastytrade roles in Chicago require right to work in the US. Krakow roles require right to work in Poland or relevant EU mobility.
A constructive view of the tastytrade integration and the firm's US strategy. Candidates joining roles that interact with tastytrade should understand that the integration is ongoing, that the US business runs with meaningful operating independence, and that constructive engagement with that reality is read as cultural fit.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does IG Group actually do?

IG Group is an online trading platform. Its retail product, IG.com, lets clients trade contracts for difference (CFDs), UK spread bets, listed options, foreign exchange, and shares (with an unleveraged share-dealing and stocks-and-shares ISA proposition) across global equities, indices, commodities, FX, and selected cryptoassets. The firm also serves professional and institutional clients and operates the tastytrade options-trading platform in the United States. Revenue comes principally from spreads, financing on leveraged positions, commissions on share dealing, and platform fees.

What ATS does IG Group use?

Workday Recruiting. The candidate-facing site is careers.iggroup.com, which resolves to the IG Workday tenant. tastytrade roles in the US are sometimes posted under the tastytrade brand on a dedicated careers surface but generally flow into the same Workday backend with a tastytrade business-unit tag. One Workday profile lets you apply to multiple roles across IG and tastytrade without re-keying your work history.

Where are IG Group's main offices?

The headquarters is Cannon Bridge House on Cannon Street in the City of London. The largest engineering hub outside London is in Krakow, Poland. Additional material offices are in Sydney (APAC trading and commercial), Singapore (APAC commercial and operations), Chicago (tastytrade), Cape Town (operations and technology), Tel Aviv (technology), Bangalore (technology and operations), Dubai (Middle East and Africa commercial), Frankfurt (EU regulated entity), and Tokyo (Japan retail trading).

How does IG Group pay London engineers compared to dealing or trading roles, and how does Krakow compare?

London engineering compensation is competitive within UK financial-services tech: roughly GBP 70,000 to GBP 110,000 base for mid-level engineers, GBP 110,000 to GBP 170,000 base for senior and staff engineers, plus a discretionary annual bonus and, for senior roles, an LTIP in IGG restricted shares or options. Dealing, market-making, and front-office trading roles are paid base plus a bonus that scales with desk performance and individual contribution; in strong years total compensation can materially exceed the equivalent engineering total. Krakow engineering compensation is competitive within the Polish IT and financial-services market and is paid in PLN, with the same structure of base, discretionary bonus, and benefits scaled to local norms. The MiFID II bonus cap applies to staff in scope of EU and UK remuneration rules.

Does IG Group sponsor work visas?

The UK entity holds a Home Office sponsor licence and can sponsor a Skilled Worker visa for senior, specialist, or shortage-list roles where the requirement is justified. Sponsorship is decided role by role and is not the default. Confirm sponsorship eligibility with the recruiter at the screening call rather than assuming. tastytrade in the US sponsors selected H-1B and other work visas where justified. Krakow can sponsor for Polish or EU mobility cases. Other regional offices follow local immigration rules.

Does IG Group run a graduate or internship programme?

Yes. The IG Group Graduate Programme historically opens for applications in autumn for the following summer's intake and recruits across technology, dealing, risk, finance, and commercial functions, run principally out of London with rotational placements. The programme is competitive: online aptitude tests, a recorded video interview, and an in-person assessment day at Cannon Bridge House are standard stages. Summer internships in the same functions also run on a published timetable and are a strong route into the graduate scheme. Krakow runs a separate engineering-focused early-careers track and tastytrade in Chicago has its own US early-careers programme.

What is the FCA regulatory environment like for IG Group and how does it affect candidates?

IG's UK retail trading entities are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The FCA, alongside ESMA in the EU and equivalent regulators in other jurisdictions, has progressively tightened the rules around retail CFDs and similar leveraged products: maximum leverage is capped, negative balance protection is mandatory, marketing incentives are restricted, and risk warnings are standardised. The Consumer Duty introduced in 2023 raised the bar further on outcomes for retail clients. Candidates should expect that compliance is a first-order commercial constraint rather than a back-office function and that the firm's strategic options are framed by the evolving regulatory environment in each market.

How does IG Group compare to Plus500, CMC Markets, eToro, and Saxo Bank as an employer?

IG is the largest and longest-established of the UK-listed retail-trading peer set. Plus500 is younger, smaller, leaner, and more marketing-led, with most engineering in Israel. CMC Markets is broadly similar in scale to IG and shares the FTSE 250 UK retail-trading universe; CMC's culture has historically been more entrepreneurial and trader-led. Saxo Bank is Danish-headquartered, broader in product (including a banking licence), and runs a more institutional, multi-asset orientation. eToro is Israeli-founded, NASDAQ-listed, and known for the social and copy-trading proposition. IG's distinctives as an employer are the scale of its engineering organisation, the maturity of its trading platform, the depth of its dealing and risk functions, the Krakow hub, the tastytrade US business, and the Cannon Street London base. Candidates often choose IG when they want a serious, regulated, technically deep platform; they often choose competitors when they want a leaner, faster, or more entrepreneurial environment.

What is the Krakow engineering hub like as a place to build a career?

Krakow is the largest engineering office outside London and runs material parts of the trading platform, dealing and risk systems, data engineering, and shared infrastructure. The office is well established and has a long history of senior engineering tenure and strong cross-team collaboration with London. Polish-language fluency is not required for engineering roles (English is the working language) but is helpful for daily life. Compensation is competitive within Polish IT and asset-management benchmarks. Hybrid working is genuinely available, typically two to three days in the Krakow office per week.

What is tastytrade and how does the US career angle work?

tastytrade is the Chicago-headquartered options-trading platform and education business that IG acquired in 2021 for approximately USD 1 billion. It was founded by Tom Sosnoff and Kristi Ross and brought a US broker-dealer entity, a self-clearing capability, and a distinctive media-led education franchise into the IG group. tastytrade roles in Chicago are posted under the tastytrade brand and require US right to work and the relevant FINRA registrations (Series 7, 24, 27, 57, 63, 65, 66 as applicable to the role). The business runs with material operating independence from London and has its own technology stack, dealing operation, and product team, while sharing selected group functions and benefiting from IG group-level capital and capability.

What is the Wheeler founder heritage and does it still matter inside the firm?

Stuart Wheeler founded IG in 1974 and built it from a single product (a spread bet on the gold price, available to British investors after the abolition of UK exchange controls) into the dominant UK retail trading franchise. Wheeler later became a prominent public figure outside the firm and passed away in 2020. The cultural inheritance from his era - technically curious, product-led, and willing to take a contrarian commercial position - is still legible in the long-tenured London teams and in the firm's pride in the trading platform itself. The Corcoran era has layered operational discipline and accountability on top of that heritage rather than replacing it. Candidates who acknowledge both the founding story and the modern operational orientation tend to land well.

What are the priorities of the Breon Corcoran era and how should I reflect them in my application?

Corcoran took over as CEO in June 2022 and has emphasised operational discipline, evidence-based decision-making, accountability, and selective growth. The strategic priorities visible in public commentary include extending the US options business through tastytrade, deepening the share-dealing and ISA proposition in the UK, growing the professional and institutional channel, modernising the technology estate, and managing the cost base alongside regulatory pressure on retail leveraged products. A strong application reflects this orientation by quantifying outcomes, being honest about trade-offs, demonstrating product engagement, and showing a constructive view of the regulatory environment rather than ignoring it.

How to Apply to IG Group

Key Takeaways

About IG Group

ATS System: Workday Recruiting (IG Group tenant)

Interview Culture

What IG Group Looks For

Frequently Asked Questions

Open Positions

Related Resources

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