Get to Know Us

Varun

London

Technology

Full-time since 2019

Transcript

GET TO KNOW US | JANE STREET

Hey, I’m Varun. I’m a software developer on the equities desk. I’m based in the London office and I joined Jane Street in 2019.

WHAT CLASSES PREPARED YOU FOR YOUR ROLE AT JANE STREET?

Lots of classes I took at school have been really helpful for me in my career here at Jane Street, especially the foundational ones: operating systems, networks, information security, some amount of programming language theory. They’ve all come in handy.

DO I NEED EXPERIENCE IN FINANCE TO APPLY TO JANE STREET?

You don’t need any experience in finance to apply for a developer role. We’ve gotten really good at teaching new developers all the necessary finance concepts and intuition they need to be successful at their job.

HOW DID YOU LEARN OCAML AND JANE STREET’S LIBRARIES?

I learned a lot of OCaml and Jane Street’s libraries through the OCaml boot camp during the internship. It’s a few weeks long course where you’re paired with a mentor and you work through lots of exercises to get familiar with the way Jane Street uses OCaml and lots of their libraries.

HOW DOES TEAM MATCHING WORK?

All developers, before they join Jane Street, go through a team matching process. This involves a series of discussions with different teams to understand what kind of work you would be working on and what kind of role you’ll be playing. The goal is to make sure you’re happy and productive working in the right team.

WHAT DOES COLLABORATION LOOK LIKE ON YOUR TEAM AND ACROSS THE FIRM?

I think both Jane Street and the dev culture is pretty collaborative. Technology runs through different aspects of Jane Street’s business – compliance, recruiting, accounting, trading, operations — and we feel because of this, developers are uniquely situated in a really good environment. They can contribute across different areas. I feel they are very autonomous in the work they do in terms of ideas they bring to different teams and they’re encouraged to even move around these different teams to share what they’ve learned across their time here. People feel pretty empowered to take initiative on their own, work on projects that they think are valuable, and contribute to areas that they have ideas in.

The next great idea will come from you