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
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.