Get to Know Us
Hear from Jane Streeters across departments and offices.
The people featured in these videos were excited to share what makes Jane Street a rewarding place to work. Whether in Trading & Research, HR & Recruiting, or Cybersecurity, everyone plays a key part in fostering our open and collaborative working culture.
While it’s hard to capture all the nuance of our firm in a series of short videos, we hope that they give you a real sense of who we are and what we do.
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.