Transcript
Get to Know Us | Jane Street
Hi, my name is Rory. I’ve been working at Jane Street since August 2020. I’m a production engineer in Order Engines on the Hotseat Engineering team.
WHAT DO YOU DO AT JANE STREET?
So when I’m on support, I am helping monitor the order engines–the systems that send orders to the market. This means that I’m responding to both internal and external outages. Internal outages are [when] a system in our scope that we designed is having a problem, and we need to figure out what’s wrong with it. And external means, “Hey, something’s going on in the world, Nasdaq is having a problem, some exchange is having a problem. And do we keep trading on? Do we turn it off? What do we do?” Jane Street is an algorithmic trading company. We rely on our systems behaving properly, and part of that means that we have humans monitoring those systems. So when I’m on the hot seat, it’s my job to ensure that Jane Street is OK to trade. And when I’m not staffing that rotation, I work on projects to improve that rotation.
WHAT’S THE MOST INTERESTING PART OF THE JOB?
Every day when you’re on support, you’re dealing with new problems, something new is happening. And that’s kind of the exciting part of it, is that you never know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of variety in what you’re actually dealing with, and if you go away for six months and come back, what’s going on in support might be completely different.
IS THE WORK STRESSFUL?
It can be stressful, but these stressful moments are also some of the most interesting moments of the job. As a production engineer, you have to deal with outages. Systems are down, and this is having an effect, so that can be a little stressful. On our team, we’ve found that people are the most stressed when they feel unprepared and unsupported. Because of this, we put a lot of effort into making sure that everybody on the team always feels like they can get help when they need it. So when people are training, they’re not put in situations they’re not ready for. They can always get a team member to assist. This has really made it so that on our team, these incidents that used to be stressful are now really not stressful, and most people on the team are actually excited by the opportunity to jump into these incidents and prove that they can really provide value and keep the systems running well.
WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO A NEW JOINER?
You go into meetings and you hear people talk and you see the code and you’re just kind of blown away. And so this made me kind of shy, and I didn’t really want to, like, ask as many questions and all these sorts of things. But everyone here is very friendly and nice and engaging, and it just took me a long time to realize that, oh, I deserve to be here. So for somebody new, I would just want them to just believe in themselves and believe the people around you and just be friendly.
WHAT’S THE INTERVIEW LIKE?
Jane Street interviews are a little bit different because we’re trying to see how you think rather than what you currently know. This might be harder to study for because it’s not just execution of some complicated problem, but it is actually closer to what the job is like.
WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE DO YOU LOOK FOR TO JOIN THE PRODUCTION ENGINEERING TEAM?
At Jane Street, we look for production engineers who are smart, capable, can communicate well, think outside the box, come up with a wide range of solutions, and people who are excited at the idea that, “Hey, something’s going to break and it’s my job to fix it.” So if this sounds like you, you should apply.
