Get to Know Us
Hear from Jane Streeters who work in a variety of roles.
The people featured in these videos jumped at the chance to answer
some of the questions we would expect to be asked in person and to
tell you firsthand what makes Jane Street a rewarding place to work.
It’s hard to capture everything that we’d like to share with you in a
series of short videos but we hope these give you a sense of what it’s
like to work at Jane Street and the types of people you’d be working
alongside.
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.
