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
Hello, my name is Nitya and I’m a trader in the New York office at
Jane Street. I started in 2019.
What did you study in school and how did it help you prepare for a job at Jane Street?
In college, I studied mathematics and computer science. I think that
fundamentally, the most important thing I learned was how to apply
quantitative reasoning skills across a wide variety of problems, and
how to kind of reason from first principles when tackling the unknown.
What classes do you recommend I take?
I always encourage people to find the hardest quantitative classes
that their college has to offer, ones that they’re genuinely excited
about taking, and to take them. I think the most important thing
you’ll gain out of college is mathematical maturity and the ability to
tackle new unseen before problems. I think that to work at Jane
Street, in addition to math maturity, it’s also important to have a
good grounding in probability to be a trader.
What type of training do new traders go through?
At Jane Street, the employees invest so much in the new hires and many
people for that reason stay for a very long time. Right when you get
there, new traders will learn OCaml through a month long boot camp,
have mock trading sessions after the close, and learn about what each
desk does through various desk related teach-ins and activities.
What is your day-to-day like?
I spend about 50% of my day doing research, working on quantitative
and statistical models that help inform our trading decisions on our
market making business. About 25% of my time I spend actually trading
or being involved with configuring, monitoring, or analyzing our
automated and semi-automated trading systems. And the remainder of the
time I split between building desk tools, working with interns, and
doing other recruiting and outreach activities.
How is working at Jane Street different than you expected?
I think working at Jane Street is different in two ways than I
expected. The first was the amount of trust that I received. I think I
felt really honored by the amount of trust that I was given to execute
projects on my own and to have trading responsibilities. And the
second was the sheer amount of collaboration. I think that people at
Jane Street are always talking to each other about math ideas, about
computer science ideas, about what they’re thinking about on a trading
basis. And that communication and collaboration is not just limited to
one desk, but happens between desks.
Without doubt, the thing that I love the most about working at Jane
Street are the people. My colleagues at Jane Street are not just
people I say hi to at the office. They’re my real life friends who I
go out to dinner with after work, who I hang out with and play board
games on the weekends. I think that’s pretty unusual for a firm, and
that kind of friendship extends beyond outside of work hours into how
we collaborate and interact on projects and trading on a day-to-day
basis.