Transcript

Get to Know Us | Jane Street

Hey, I’m Minjie! I’m a software developer here in Jane Street. I’m working from Hong Kong office on our cybersecurity team. I started back in 2019.

Do I need experience in finance to apply?

It is definitely fine for you to apply for Jane Street when you don’t have that much financial experience. Me, for example, have never worked in financial industry back when I applied for Jane Street.

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

Back in college, I took a lot of classes about theorem proving and very math, heavy computing theory classes.

They seem to be very distant from the industry, but the project I’m working on right now is a permissioning system that uses this kind of mathematical logical proof to prove that people have access to a certain system. And that turns out, turns out that all my experiences in theoretical computing, it’s very useful.

What types of projects do people work on during an internship?

I was an intern back in 2018. All the intern projects I did were very related to the production system in Jane Street. They’re all projects that are of urgent needs of the company. I can still see some of the code I wrote during my internship up and running in production till this day. And I’m really proud about that.

Did you use OCaml before Jane Street?

I didn’t have any prior experience about OCaml before the internship in Jane Street, but that didn’t really affect my internship because during the first day of the internship, you are put through an OCaml Boot Camp and it teaches you all the fundamentals you need to know about OCaml and helps you get, get up to speed.

What are the code review and release processes?

Whenever you want to contribute to a library or an app, it will require review from the owner or the dedicated member of that app. And once the review is done, you’re allowed to release your features and they will be rolled into production. Once the review process is done, your feature will be released and it will be rolled into production during the next roll off the project.

What is collaboration at Jane Street like?

It is very open here in Jane Street. Everyone is happy to help out each other. And whenever you have a question, you can just shout in the middle of the floor being like, “does anyone know anything about this specific problem?” and there are always people happy to help you if they have expertise.

In your cybersecurity role, how closely do you work with other groups?

In the technical aspect, we work really closely with the networking team, but we do not work much with trading and traders. But we do go around and talk to traders about cybersecurity awareness to keep our firm safe.

Who is the end user for your work?

Ultimately the end user for our team, is everyone in the firm. We are trying our best to keep our firm safe and we’re trying to raise awareness in cybersecurity.

I love working at Jane Street because you get to work with an elegant language called OCaml, and also a lot of brilliant people around the world. There are always interesting problems for you to solve during the day-to-day work. And also you get to make a great impact to the outside world.