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.