Transcript

Get to Know Us | Jane Street

I’m Matt. I work in the London office and I started in 2019. I work as a dev in trading systems.

Do I need experience in finance to apply?

No, so you don’t necessarily need any finance experience to apply, and I certainly didn’t have any when I started. Within my team, there are people who work more closely with trading and people who virtually never think about it, and the nice thing about the time that I’ve spent within my team is that I’ve been able to learn things about trading and finance as I’ve gone along.

What classes did you take that prepared you for post-college life and work at Jane Street?

Of course the traditional computer science courses were very useful for the practical skills that you might need as a software developer. In particular, the team that I work in cares a lot about performance, and so having a background with distributed systems and operating systems was really useful, but often a lot of the soft skills developed in other courses have been really useful as well, so courses where you have to give presentations or write dissertations were also really useful for developing writing and presentation skills.

What kinds of projects do interns work on?

Interns at Jane Street typically work on things that full-timers don’t have time for, but are still really important for the company, and personally, I found it really rewarding coming back a year later as a full-timer and seeing the things that I’d worked on as an intern running in production. Obviously, the role of an intern isn’t exactly the same as a full-timer. There are certain things that it just doesn’t make sense for interns to work on, maintaining systems and things, but the day-to-day work of developing features and working on new technology is really very similar between being an intern and a full-timer.

Did you use OCaml before Jane Street?

So before I worked at Jane Street, I hadn’t really written very much in OCaml. I’d written a lot of Python and C++, and I found adapting to using OCaml fairly straightforward. Jane Street has a boot camp program for new hires and interns, and I actually often find myself missing a lot of the functionality from OCaml when I go back to using other programming languages.

What is the company culture like at Jane Street?

I think a good way of describing the culture at Jane Street is that if you walked through the trading floor, assuming that we were all working in the office, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between who’s been working there for 20 years and who’s been working there for a month, and I think that this allows for an atmosphere where the best idea tends to win and this is something that I’ve seen within my team.

Do you feel connected to your team while working from home?

Although starting to work from home required some adjustment, I found that it’s had a leveling effect where, because everyone is in the same position, there’s less of a distinction between people from different offices, and this has actually enabled maybe some easier communication between people in different offices.

I think my favorite thing about working at Jane Street is that because we develop so many things in-house, there’s always someone really knowledgeable that you can talk to when you’re trying to develop something new.