Strategy and Product at Jane Street
“The SP role gets to solve, in my opinion, the most interesting questions because we’re thinking about this bigger picture: what should Jane Street be doing next?”
-Lily, Strategy and Product
Hear more from our SP team.
Envision what’s next at Jane Street
SPs are versatile generalists who take a deeply analytical and strategic approach to solving Jane Street’s most pressing problems. They move across groups as firm priorities evolve, developing a holistic view of our business and driving cross-functional growth.
Drive solutions with a firmwide perspective
Most SP careers start with a year-long set of rotations across the entirety of Jane Street’s business - including trading, technology, finance, compliance, operations, and more. The rotations help new SPs develop a broadened skill set, strong cross-group connections, and a detailed understanding of how all the pieces of our business fit together.
This central foundation prepares an SP to take ownership over strategic efforts, both within their team and in cross-functional initiatives. While the rotational year ends with a ‘permanent’ group placement, SPs often move across teams throughout their careers as their interests and the firm’s priorities shift. This ultimately allows successful SPs to take an increasingly central role in shaping our business.
What kinds of projects do SPs drive?
Building out new lines of business
Developing new businesses requires rapidly becoming domain experts in unfamiliar markets. SPs guide these initiatives from the earliest stages of research to the final rollout. A recent example is when Jane Street began trading physically-settled natural gas: SPs on trading desks analyzed the market's unique microstructure, built new counterparty relationships, and navigated the intricate operational complexities of moving and storing a physical commodity.
Scaling infrastructure and partnerships
Increasing trading capacity requires analyzing and modeling constraints across the firm's network of external providers. This involves collaborating with trading desks to understand volume projections, managing exposure across prime brokers, and optimizing resource allocation. Recently, SPs in finance led the design of a new position management system that consolidated previously fragmented optimization flows into a unified framework, enabling centralized decision-making across asset classes and providers.
Integrating new trading flows
Expansions into new markets and products are exciting opportunities of growth. Paired with that excitement is the challenge of understanding the complexities of new products and revamping Jane Street’s software infrastructure to support them. How should we represent exotic products and their metadata in our systems? What’s the best way to record and reconcile the activity? Do we need to come up with a unique way to represent their risk? SPs in technology groups find the answers to these questions and work with their groups to implement them
Responding to changing market norms and regulations
Understanding and systematically encoding market rules and practices into our infrastructure is essential for the smooth day-to-day running of the firm. Significant changes to these norms, such as the shortening of the US trade settlement cycle from T+2 to T+1 or unexpected government sanctions on international markets, cause industry-wide uncertainty. SPs in compliance and operations predict the practical impact of these changes and serve as the first line of consultation as the firm updates policies and systems. Quick, decisive action turns these challenging moments into opportunities to have a competitive advantage.
Streamlining core workflows
Not every valuable project is tied to a novel idea or a sudden change in market conditions. SPs in all groups also work closely alongside those performing the critical day-to-day functions of their teams. They shadow existing workflows to build an understanding of the financial concepts and technical systems involved, scope out solutions to challenging pain points, and then implement valuable changes. These incremental improvements that lower complexity, reduce risk, or improve efficiency have a compounding impact.
Opportunities
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Open Roles
Full-Time: experienced candidates leverage their backgrounds to tackle problems at Jane Street.
Internship: students spend their internship learning from teams across our business.