How to Apply to IMI

10 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 11 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • IMI plc is a 160-plus-year-old Birmingham-headquartered industrial engineering group, demerged from ICI in 1986, that designs valves, actuators, and flow control products for nuclear, LNG, refining, HVAC, and industrial automation markets across approximately 10,000 employees in 50-plus countries.
  • The careers system is Trakstar Hire, with each operating division (Precision, Hydronic, Critical/Process Automation) running its own subdomain at imi[division].hire.trakstar.com rather than a unified single portal, so search and apply through the parent imiplc.com/careers page to land on the right one.
  • Engineering depth in valves, actuators, and process equipment, plus literacy in code regimes like ASME, API, IEC 61508, ATEX, and 10 CFR 50 Appendix B, are far more valuable than generic FAANG-style polish on the resume.
  • Birmingham HQ is a real workplace expectation for corporate roles but most engineering and operations hiring is distributed across UK Midlands, Czechia, Germany, Switzerland, US Midwest and Northeast, India, and China plants. Plant visits during interviews are normal and skipping them signals lack of commitment.
  • UK base salaries for mechanical, controls, and applications engineers at IMI typically run from GBP 40,000 to 90,000 depending on level and division, materially below London tech but in line with or slightly above the wider UK industrial engineering market. Total comp is salary-heavy with limited equity exposure outside senior leadership.
  • Offers are most often lost to Spirax-Sarco (Cheltenham), Rotork (Bath), Weir Group (Glasgow), Edwards Vacuum (Burgess Hill), and Renishaw (Wotton-under-Edge) for UK candidates, plus Emerson Fisher and Flowserve internationally. Compensation and location are the two most common deciders.
  • End-market cyclicality is real: nuclear new-build, LNG, and oil and gas capex cycles drive Critical Engineering hiring waves and pauses. Honest framing of this volatility in interviews and self-selection on personal risk tolerance avoids surprise downstream.
  • The Future Leaders Programme is the flagship graduate pathway, with approximately ten places per cohort split across the UK, US, and Germany. Degree classification, technical discipline, and prior engineering placement experience matter more than generic extracurriculars.
  • Aftermarket service and digital offerings (smart valves, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance) are the strategic growth vectors under CEO Roy Twite's One IMI plan, and candidates who can speak credibly to data, IIoT, or service business model design are increasingly in demand alongside traditional mechanical engineers.

About IMI

IMI plc is a British industrial engineering group headquartered in Birmingham, England, with roots stretching back to 1862 as Imperial Metal Industries. The modern IMI emerged in 1986 when the metals business was demerged from Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and listed independently on the London Stock Exchange. Over the following four decades, IMI shed its commodity metals operations and re-engineered itself into a focused fluid and motion control specialist, divesting historical units like Polypipe, IMI Cornelius (beverage dispense), Norgren's industrial automation pieces in some markets, and other non-core businesses to concentrate on highly engineered valves, actuators, and flow control products. Today IMI is a FTSE 100 (and at times FTSE 250 boundary) constituent with revenues over GBP 2 billion, approximately 10,000 employees, and operations in more than 50 countries. The group is organized around three operating divisions: IMI Critical Engineering designs severe-service control and isolation valves used in nuclear power, LNG, petrochemicals, refining, and upstream oil and gas where failure is not an option; IMI Hydronic Engineering (also marketed as IMI Climate Control) supplies HVAC balancing valves, thermostatic radiator valves, actuators, and pressure-independent control valves under the TA, Heimeier, and Pneumatex brands; and IMI Precision Engineering (which has been progressively reorganised under the IMI Process Automation and IMI One umbrella as part of the Growth Hub strategy) builds motion and fluid control technologies under brands like Norgren, Buschjost, Maxseal, FAS, and Bimba. CEO Roy Twite, an IMI lifer who joined as a graduate engineer in 1988 and took the top job in 2019, has driven the IMI Growth Accelerator and One IMI strategy that pushes the company toward higher-margin aftermarket service revenue and decarbonisation-aligned end markets. Chair Jamie Pike succeeded Lord Smith of Kelvin on the board in 2025, and Luke Grant was appointed CFO the same year. The company's positioning around nuclear new-build, LNG export terminals, and the energy transition makes it a meaningful but cyclical employer for mid-career engineers.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Search openings on the central careers portal at imiplc

    Search openings on the central careers portal at imiplc.com/careers, then click through to the relevant divisional careers site. Each division (Precision, Hydronic, Critical/Process Automation) maintains its own Trakstar Hire portal at subdomains like imiprecisionengineering.hire.trakstar.com and imihydronicengineering.hire.trakstar.com, so the same role is rarely cross-posted to the parent site.

  2. 2
    Create a Trakstar Hire candidate account using the email you actively monitor

    Create a Trakstar Hire candidate account using the email you actively monitor. Trakstar is a lighter-weight ATS than SuccessFactors or Workday and does not auto-import from LinkedIn, so you will need to upload a CV (PDF preferred for formatting fidelity) and manually fill in employment history fields rather than relying on parsing.

  3. 3
    Complete the divisional application form

    Complete the divisional application form. Expect questions on UK or relevant country work authorisation status (IMI is a sponsor of skilled worker visas in the UK but only for specialist roles where they cannot recruit locally), notice period, current and expected salary in local currency, and willingness to travel to customer sites or to other IMI plants.

  4. 4
    For engineering and operations roles, be prepared for a recruiter screen within

    For engineering and operations roles, be prepared for a recruiter screen within one to two weeks if your application advances. The recruiter will calibrate on technical scope (valve type experience, ATEX/IECEx knowledge, ASME/API code familiarity, CAD systems used) and on location flexibility before passing you to the hiring manager.

  5. 5
    Hiring manager interview is typically a one-hour technical conversation, often o

    Hiring manager interview is typically a one-hour technical conversation, often onsite at the relevant plant (Birmingham HQ, Plymouth MN, University Park IL, Palmer MA in the US; Brno in Czechia; Alpen in Germany; Lindau in Switzerland for Hydronic). Remote-first interviews via Microsoft Teams are common for the first round but later rounds usually require a site visit so you can see the manufacturing floor and meet the wider team.

  6. 6
    Final stage is a panel interview that includes the hiring manager, a peer or cro

    Final stage is a panel interview that includes the hiring manager, a peer or cross-functional stakeholder (quality, supply chain, or applications engineering depending on role), and the divisional HR business partner. You may be asked to prepare a short presentation on a past project, particularly for engineering manager, project manager, or business development roles.

  7. 7
    Offers are extended verbally first by the recruiter, followed by a written offer

    Offers are extended verbally first by the recruiter, followed by a written offer through Trakstar. Expect two to four weeks from final interview to offer for plant-level roles, and four to eight weeks for senior or international positions where multiple stakeholders and compensation committee sign-off are involved.

Resume Tips for IMI

recommended

Lead with industry-relevant valve, actuator, or flow control experience

Lead with industry-relevant valve, actuator, or flow control experience. IMI hires from a relatively narrow pool of competitors (Emerson Fisher, Flowserve, Weir Group, Spirax-Sarco, Rotork, Crane, Velan, Curtiss-Wright) and adjacent process equipment vendors, so naming specific product families (severe service, choke valves, balancing valves, solenoid valves, pneumatic cylinders) signals immediate context.

recommended

State your right-to-work status explicitly for UK and EU roles

State your right-to-work status explicitly for UK and EU roles. IMI will sponsor skilled worker visas for hard-to-fill technical positions but the default assumption for plant-level production, machining, and assembly roles is that you already have permission to work in the country of the posting. For US roles, indicate citizenship, green card, or visa status given ITAR-adjacent work in some Critical Engineering programmes.

recommended

Include code, standard, and certification keywords that map to IMI's regulated e

Include code, standard, and certification keywords that map to IMI's regulated end markets: ASME B16.34, API 6D, API 600, API 602, IEC 61508 (functional safety / SIL), ATEX, IECEx, NACE MR0175, PED 2014/68/EU, ASME Section VIII, 10 CFR 50 Appendix B (nuclear quality), and N-stamp where applicable. ATS keyword matching at IMI is less aggressive than at FAANG-style employers but recruiters do filter manually on these terms.

recommended

Quantify in engineering units that matter to the role

Quantify in engineering units that matter to the role. For Critical Engineering: pressure class (ANSI 150 through 4500), temperature range, Cv values, leakage class (ANSI/FCI 70-2 Class IV through VI), and the project value or production rate of the end facility. For Hydronic: BTU/h or kW capacity, building square footage, and LEED or BREEAM credits achieved. For Precision: cycle times, MTBF, and cost-down percentages on consolidation projects.

recommended

Emphasise customer-facing or applications engineering experience for sales and b

Emphasise customer-facing or applications engineering experience for sales and business development roles. IMI's commercial wins are technical sales cycles measured in quarters or years, not transactional. Showing you can run a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) cycle with an EPC like Bechtel, Worley, Fluor, or McDermott carries more weight than generic 'exceeded quota' bullets.

recommended

Highlight Lean, Six Sigma, and IMI Production System exposure for operations and

Highlight Lean, Six Sigma, and IMI Production System exposure for operations and continuous improvement roles. IMI runs an internal CI methodology heavily influenced by Toyota Production System principles. Green Belt or Black Belt certifications, kaizen event leadership, and value stream mapping projects map directly to internal vocabulary.

recommended

For early careers and graduate scheme applications, lead with your degree classi

For early careers and graduate scheme applications, lead with your degree classification (2:1 or above is the published bar for the Future Leaders Programme), your engineering discipline (mechanical, electrical, chemical, manufacturing, or controls), and any year-in-industry placement or summer internship at a relevant employer. Strong A-level grades in maths and physics still matter for UK applicants given the engineering context.

recommended

Keep CV length to two pages for individual contributor roles and three pages max

Keep CV length to two pages for individual contributor roles and three pages maximum for senior leadership. Trakstar's recruiter view does not enforce a length cap but Birmingham-based talent acquisition teams skew traditional in their formatting expectations. PDF, sans-serif, no graphic gimmicks, no photo (UK convention).

Interview Culture

Interviewing at IMI feels distinctly British industrial engineering: deliberate, technically rigorous, and grounded in the manufacturing floor rather than a glass tower.

The headquarters in Birmingham (officially at Lakeside, Solihull on the city's southern edge) houses corporate functions, divisional leadership for some businesses, and the executive committee, but most engineering and commercial work happens in the operating divisions distributed across plants in the UK Midlands, Czechia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, India, China, and the US Midwest and Northeast. Interview panels reflect this distribution. A senior project engineer role for IMI Critical might involve a Microsoft Teams interview with a hiring manager in Manchester, a peer review with an applications lead in Brno, and a final-round visit to Houston or Birmingham depending on the role's customer base. Candidates should expect plant tours as part of the final round for any operations or engineering position; turning down the tour signals you are not serious about the job. The cultural cadence is set by the IMI Way values: 'we are one IMI, we have integrity, we deliver on our promises, we are bold, we win together.' Interviewers will not quote these at you but will probe for evidence of cross-functional collaboration, customer-first thinking, and pragmatic delivery against committed dates. Compared to London-headquartered firms in tech or finance, IMI moves at a slower deliberate pace, prizes long-tenure employees who understand the product physics, and is more willing to invest in apprenticeship and graduate development than in lateral hiring of generalists. Expect questions about why you specifically want to work in industrial flow control versus more glamorous adjacent sectors (aerospace, semiconductors, software). Honest answers about wanting to build physical products that matter for energy, water, and built-environment infrastructure land well. Performative passion does not. Dress code for interviews is business or business-casual at corporate sites, smart-casual with safety shoes provided for plant tours.

What IMI Looks For

  • Demonstrable depth in a specific engineering discipline relevant to fluid or motion control: mechanical design, materials and metallurgy (especially for severe service alloys like Inconel, Hastelloy, Stellite), control systems, instrumentation, applications engineering, or process engineering with valve sizing and selection experience.
  • Direct experience with one or more of IMI's core end markets: nuclear (new build PWR/SMR, life extension, decommissioning), LNG liquefaction and regasification, midstream oil and gas, refining and petrochemical, conventional and renewable power generation, district heating, commercial and institutional HVAC, life sciences manufacturing, or rail and transit.
  • Customer-facing capability for commercial roles. IMI sells through a mix of direct technical sales, channel partners, EPCs, and OEMs depending on the division. Successful BD and key account hires can articulate a multi-year relationship strategy with a named customer rather than just transactional wins.
  • Continuous improvement orientation grounded in real shop-floor experience. IMI's plants run lean methodologies seriously and managers expect new hires at supervisor and above to lead kaizen events, drive 5S, and improve OEE within their first year.
  • International mobility and cultural fluency. The company moves engineers and managers between Birmingham, Brno, Alpen, Lindau, Plymouth (MN), and Querétaro for project assignments and career development. Candidates who flag willingness to relocate or do extended international assignments stand out for fast-track tracks.
  • Quality systems literacy: ISO 9001 as a baseline, plus nuclear-grade quality (10 CFR 50 Appendix B, ASME NQA-1) for Critical Engineering, and IATF 16949 for any Precision Engineering roles touching automotive customers. Auditor or lead auditor qualifications are a plus.
  • Honesty about cyclical industry dynamics. IMI candidates who demonstrate awareness that nuclear and LNG order cycles are uneven, that HVAC volumes track non-residential construction, and that aftermarket service is the margin engine score better than candidates who pitch generic 'growth' narratives.
  • Pride in unglamorous craft. Severe-service valves, balancing valves, and solenoid valves are not consumer-facing technology. The hiring bar favours candidates who get genuinely interested in solving a coker isolation valve thermal cycling problem or a cavitation issue in a feedwater control valve.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does IMI plc use, and how is it different from applying to other large engineering employers?
IMI plc uses Trakstar Hire, with each operating division running its own portal: imiprecisionengineering.hire.trakstar.com, imihydronicengineering.hire.trakstar.com, and imicriticalengineering.hire.trakstar.com (which now serves IMI Process Automation). This is lighter-weight than the SuccessFactors or Workday systems used by larger industrial peers like Honeywell or Emerson, so expect manual form filling rather than aggressive resume parsing, and double-check that the role you applied for sits in the correct divisional pipeline.
What is the typical UK salary band for engineering roles at IMI plc?
UK engineering base salaries at IMI generally fall between GBP 40,000 and 90,000. A graduate engineer on the Future Leaders Programme starts around GBP 32,000 to 38,000 plus relocation and a development allowance. Senior design or applications engineers typically earn GBP 55,000 to 75,000, engineering managers GBP 75,000 to 95,000, and division-level technical directors push into low six figures. Sales roles include OTE up to 30 percent on top of base. Bonus targets for non-sales staff sit in the 10 to 25 percent range tied to divisional and group performance.
Why do offers from IMI most often get rejected, and to whom?
The most common loss patterns are to Spirax-Sarco for thermal energy and steam roles, Rotork for actuator and flow control engineers, Weir Group for upstream oil and gas and minerals candidates, and Edwards Vacuum or Renishaw for precision manufacturing talent. Reasons cluster around three issues: London or international competitor base pay can be 15 to 25 percent higher for comparable roles, candidates underestimating Birmingham as a place to live until they visit, and FTSE peers offering more aggressive long-term incentive plans for senior hires. Honest comp benchmarking before final-round interviews avoids most of these losses.
Is Birmingham really where the work happens, or is the role location flexible?
The corporate centre and executive committee sit at the Lakeside campus in Solihull on Birmingham's southern fringe, but most engineering, manufacturing, and commercial work happens at divisional plants. IMI Hydronic engineering depth lives in Lindau, Switzerland and Erwitte, Germany; IMI Critical / Process Automation in Brno, Czechia and Manchester, UK; IMI Precision and Process Automation in Alpen, Germany, Brescia, Italy, and Plymouth, Minnesota and University Park, Illinois in the US. Hybrid working is normal for office-based roles (typically two to three days onsite) but plant-floor and applications engineering positions are fully onsite by necessity.
How cyclical are nuclear and LNG hiring, and should that affect my decision?
Critical Engineering revenue is genuinely lumpy. Nuclear new-build orders (AP1000, EPR, SMR programmes), LNG liquefaction trains, and major refinery turnarounds drive multi-year hiring waves followed by quieter periods focused on aftermarket service and smaller projects. Recent demand has been strong on the back of European energy security spending and US LNG export expansion, but candidates should weigh this against personal risk tolerance. The aftermarket service business smooths the cycle and is the strategic priority under CEO Roy Twite, so service engineering, field service, and digital condition monitoring roles are structurally more stable than new-construction project engineering.
Does IMI plc sponsor work visas for international candidates?
Yes for hard-to-fill technical roles, no by default for plant-level operations or commercial positions. IMI holds a UK skilled worker sponsor licence and routinely sponsors specialist engineers for Critical Engineering and senior commercial roles where the local market cannot supply the talent. For US positions, H-1B sponsorship happens but is selective and skewed to advanced engineering and management roles. EU and intra-European mobility is straightforward given the multi-country footprint. Do not assume sponsorship; ask the recruiter explicitly during the screen.
What does the Future Leaders Programme actually involve, and is it competitive?
The Future Leaders Programme is a three-year graduate scheme with around ten places per cohort across the UK, US, and Germany. It rotates participants through three roles (typically engineering, operations, and a commercial or strategy function) across at least two countries, with structured mentorship from divisional executives and a Birmingham-based learning curriculum. Competition is genuinely tough: a 2:1 or first-class degree in engineering or a quantitative discipline, demonstrated leadership outside academics, prior internship or year-in-industry experience, and language skills beyond English are all material differentiators. Application opens in the autumn for the following September start.
How does IMI's compensation compare to UK tech employers in London?
Honestly, it does not compete on cash. A senior software engineer in London tech (Stripe, Monzo, Revolut, Bloomberg) clears GBP 100,000 to 180,000 base plus equity that can double total comp. A senior IMI engineer in Birmingham clears GBP 70,000 to 90,000 base with a 15 to 20 percent bonus and limited equity outside the executive committee. Where IMI wins is real-product engineering substance, lower cost of living in the Midlands (housing roughly half London prices), genuine career development in a global business, and the chance to work on infrastructure that will outlast every consumer app shipped this decade. Pick the comparison that matters to you.
What red flags should I watch for in the IMI interview process?
Three patterns worth noting. First, if the recruiter cannot name the specific divisional cost centre or project the role supports, the requisition may be speculative and could be paused. Second, if the hiring manager interview is rushed or conducted by HR alone, the divisional engineering leadership may not be fully bought in to the hire. Third, if compensation is described in vague ranges and not pinned down before the final round, expect a tighter offer than implied. Push for clarity on all three early. Conversely, plant tours, named peer interviewers, and clear written feedback after each round are positive signals of a healthy process.
What is IMI's stance on hybrid and remote work in 2026?
Office-based corporate roles in finance, IT, marketing, HR, and group functions typically run a hybrid pattern of two to three days onsite at Birmingham or the relevant divisional centre. Engineering roles tied to test rigs, plant trials, or applications support are predominantly onsite. Field service and applications engineers travel heavily to customer sites and have no fixed office expectation. Fully remote roles do exist but are rare and concentrated in software, digital marketing, and certain business development territories. The cultural default leans toward in-person collaboration consistent with broader UK industrial engineering norms rather than the remote-first stance of US tech employers.

Open Positions

IMI currently has 11 open positions.

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