Get to Know Us

Blake

London

Trading, Research, and Machine Learning

Full-time since 2017

Transcript

GET TO KNOW US | JANE STREET

My name is Blake. I’m a TDO*. I work out of the London office and I’ve been here since 2017.

WHAT IS YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LIKE?

So there really isn’t such a thing as a typical day-to-day as a TDO. It will vary between desks and between individuals. I tend to spend most of my time thinking about the code that we’re writing as a team. My work includes writing features for existing tools as well as creating entirely new ones and ensuring that we are sort of keeping up with the desk’s ever-changing needs. As a TDO, you’re located on the trading desk itself, so you spend a lot of your time interacting with traders pretty directly. Additionally, the TDO role serves as a point of interaction between the desk and the rest of Jane Street. So you’ll spend a lot of time working with, for example, the operations team, the Legal and Compliance team, and the devs that manage the various tools that we use across Jane Street.

HOW HAVE YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES EVOLVED OVER TIME AS A TDO?

There is no one-size-fits-all story to your career progression as a TDO at Jane Street. In year one as a TDO, you’re going to be embedded in work that’s going to be teaching you about the day-to-day running of the desk itself. So this is going to look like maybe managing the manual booking of trades, our various reconciliation tools and thinking about optimizations to how we manage our positions. By year three as a TDO, with a greater understanding of how your desk fits into the wider Jane Street infrastructure, you’ll probably be spending a greater proportion of your time on project work. The specifics of which will vary depending on your own skills and interests. This might mean writing code, this might mean spending more time thinking about optimizations to our trading flow, or this might mean becoming an expert in the operational side of our business and thinking about improvements that can be made there.

IS THERE ANY CHANCE OF BECOMING A DEV OR A TRADER AFTER STARTING AS A TDO?

An important thing to note about the TDO role is that it’s very much a role and a trajectory of its own, and it shouldn’t really be seen as a pathway into being a trader or being a dev. If you are interested in the trader or dev roles, then you should apply for those roles directly.

WHAT IS SOMETHING YOU WISH YOU KNEW WHEN YOU FIRST JOINED JANE STREET?

Something I wish I knew when I first joined Jane Street is how friendly and genuinely eager to chat about things they’re working on people are. And I think realizing just how humble everyone here is and just how keen people are to talk about the interesting things they’re working on has made my experience of working here a lot more fun.

WHAT’S KEPT YOU AT JANE STREET?

What’s kept me at Jane Street primarily has been its culture. While I think it’s certainly healthy to maintain a certain amount of skepticism with respect to how a firm talks about itself and its own culture, I have been continually surprised about how true Jane Street’s talk about its culture has been. I think that this can largely be attributed to the conscious decisions made by people at every level of Jane Street and throughout its history to actively cultivate and maintain this culture of intellectual humility and of the lack of artificial boundaries of bureaucracy and of hierarchy.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU SHARE WITH NEW HIRES?

A piece of advice I’d give to a new hire would be to take the number of questions that you think is appropriate to ask in a day and multiply that number by about ten. I think the only real limiting factor here is your own willingness to ask people things. I’ve not really met anyone here who has not been willing to give you the time to explain something. Not only is this great for your own learning and development, I think that cultivating the habit of saying, “I don’t know” is useful in every line of work and also particularly in trading, where mistakes can be quite costly.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE THING ABOUT WORKING AT JANE STREET?

One of my favorite things about working at Jane Street, other than the food, is the autonomy you’re given. Knowing that you’re trusted to do your own job and you’re given the tools to be able to do it well, whether that’s mentoring or physically relocating your desk to work with a group you want to work with, knowing that Jane Street kind of has your back to do that makes working here an extremely fun and rewarding place.


*As of December 2023, the “TDO” title has been updated to “TDOE,” standing for Trading Desk Operations Engineer.

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