Transcript

GET TO KNOW US | JANE STREET

Hey, I’m Declan. I’m a quantitative researcher in the London office and I started in January 2021.

WHAT KINDS OF PROJECTS DO RESEARCHERS WORK ON AT JANE STREET?

Researchers work on a really wide range of projects. There’s kind of no limit. We have very, very dev-y projects as well as very, very trader-y projects. We have projects that are extremely short-term that might result in a trade being put on that very same day, as well as projects that are much longer term that might result in a huge trading system sending billions of orders. People tend to gravitate towards some combination of what they’re good at and what they enjoy, which is usually the same thing. But we trade almost everything at a huge range of frequencies. There’s no limit to what you can work on. If I had to pin it down to one theme, it would be data analysis on large, noisy, partially structured data sets.

HOW OFTEN DO RESEARCHERS COLLABORATE WITH OTHER GROUPS AT THE FIRM?

I sit with the Fixed Income desk and it’s very, very collaborative and specific job title doesn’t really matter that much. We have devs, traders, and researchers involved at every stage of a trade, right from looking at what the market’s doing and initial ideation all the way up to writing the code that sends the orders. For collaborating with other offices, London is in a really good spot because we have overlap with both New York and Hong Kong. People tend to specialize in the problems related to their specific office and in many ways the markets there are very different, but in other ways they’re also very, very similar. And we’re always looking for ways to share tools and ideas across the offices.

WHAT KIND OF RESEARCH WOULD YOU RECOMMEND I FOCUS ON IF I WANT TO WORK AT JANE STREET?

You should work on research that you find interesting. We’re much more interested in finding smart and curious people than we are in finding people who know specific things.

DO I NEED EXPERIENCE IN FINANCE TO APPLY TO JANE STREET?

There’s no expectation whatsoever of any finance or coding knowledge. It’s much easier to teach the domain and the tools than it is to teach instinct and curiosity.

WHAT CLASSES WOULD YOU RECOMMEND I TAKE BEFORE INTERNING AT JANE STREET?

I think the classes you should take are again, things that you find interesting and things that you’re good at. For me personally, some of the most useful classes I remember from university were those that taught me how to code. Also those that taught me how to present information and present to other people. Usually when you work very, very deeply on a problem and find an answer, that’s only half the battle. The other half is presenting what you’ve learned to other people who haven’t spent as long in the weeds as you have.

WHAT TIPS DO YOU HAVE FOR SOMEONE PREPARING FOR A RESEARCH INTERVIEW?

When you’re preparing for a Jane Street interview, definitely don’t go and read a bunch of finance textbooks or memorize the derivation for Black-Scholes or anything like that. I think getting familiar and fluent with basic probability and basic game theory is always going to be useful. Communicating in an interview can obviously be very difficult, very stressful, and very unnatural. If this is something that you struggle with, working through some problems with a friend out loud can really help.

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW JANE STREET USES MACHINE LEARNING?

I can’t really get into the specifics of the machine learning we’re doing at Jane Street. But one thing I find personally even more interesting than the techniques themselves is getting them to work on financial data. This is sort of like data science, but on maximum difficulty. Signal to noise ratios are extremely poor. Nothing is IID and nothing is stationary. And getting machine learning to work on data sets like this is never as simple as downloading something from the internet and clicking go. It requires you to understand both the world and your process for modeling it extremely well.

DO RESEARCHERS AT JANE STREET PUBLISH AND GO TO CONFERENCES?

We don’t publish and we don’t present, but we usually have a presence at a lot of major conferences. So if you’re at a conference, try to find us, meet us in person, and get some free swag.

DO YOU NEED TO HAVE A PHD TO WORK IN THE RESEARCH GROUP?

I don’t have one. Some people do have them. We invest a lot in training people. So joining is definitely not the end of education.