Transcript

Get to Know Us | Jane Street

Hi. My name is Max. I work in Jane Street’s New York City office in trading systems and I’ve been working here since 2018.

Do I need experience in finance to apply?

No, you do not need any finance experience to work at Jane Street. In fact, when I joined, I knew absolutely nothing about finance and the finance industry. Everything I need to know, I’ve learned on the job from my coworkers.

Are there classes you took in school that helped you prepare for the work that you do at Jane Street?

In terms of work, my work as a programmer and software developer, the technical classes that I think helped the most were all systems classes, for me. This is both distributed systems, even down to the operating system level. I think these are sort of the basic building blocks of all work with computers, in my mind, and so having a strong foundation in these, to me, has proven very helpful. Beyond technical classes, I also think something that has helped me a lot is having a strong focus on writing and having some classes that challenged me to become a better writer.

What kinds of projects do interns work on?

When we’re choosing intern projects, as much as possible, we try to just take projects off of the dev team’s normal stack for full-time work. This means that the projects that interns work on nearly always are something that wasn’t specifically created to be an intern project. Rather, it’s just a project that if there weren’t an intern working on it, it would be a full-time developer working on this.

Did you use OCaml before working at Jane Street?

Before I joined Jane Street, I had basically never read or written any OCaml at all. Knowing OCaml is absolutely not a prerequisite to work either as an intern or a full-time developer at Jane Street. This is something that we teach new hire interns at devs, and we spent a lot of time developing tools and lessons to help people who are unfamiliar with OCaml pick it up quickly.

How did you learn OCaml and Jane Street’s libraries?

Jane Street has a boot camp program which teaches you everything you need to know about the OCaml syntax as well as Jane Street’s libraries.

What is the culture on the dev team like?

Dev culture within Jane Street places a strong focus on clear communication and collaboration. For example, in the code review process, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to best communicate feedback clearly in order to work together as a team to build the best software that we can.

How closely do you work with other groups?

Lots of developers within Jane Street work very closely with other developers. Some groups also work very close with other groups. For example, I work within trading systems and we work very closely in particular with the trading group.

Who are your end users and where does your work go?

As a developer within Jane Street, the end users of the code that I write are mostly other folks that work within Jane Street, either other developers or traders within the company.

The thing that I love most about Jane Street are the people I work with. I think my coworkers are some of the smartest, most respectful and funniest people that I know. I really look forward to coming into work every day, because I love to hang out with these people, and most importantly to work together to build some really cool stuff.