Transcript

GET TO KNOW US | JANE STREET

I’m Val. I work as a software developer for Jane Street in the London office, and I started here in 2018.

WHAT TYPE OF COURSEWORK PREPARED YOU FOR YOUR ROLE AT JANE STREET?

I studied computer science at university. That was quite a good preparation, even though I don’t think it’s completely necessary. Right? I think if you want to be a developer at Jane Street, there are some things that you would need to know, such as some data structures, some algorithms. Whenever I have had things that I haven’t learned in university, there have been people here willing to teach me that. So it’s never been a problem.

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

I didn’t have any finance experience coming in and that was fine. We tend to teach people everything that they need to know. I didn’t know OCaml coming in and I didn’t know finance coming in. Even if you don’t know what a share in a company represents or any sort of other finance things, it’s fine.

WHAT KINDS OF PROJECTS DO INTERNS WORK ON?

With the internship, what we try to do is put people in situations that really show them what working at Jane Street is like. The way we think about the internship isn’t just, “Oh, we’re going to evaluate a candidate for a summer and then decide, do we want that person to work for us or not?” We think of it as a two-way street. We also think it’s very important for interns themselves to understand enough what the job is going to be like as a full timer, such that they can make the decision of whether that’s something that they actually want.

WHAT ARE THE CODE REVIEW AND RELEASE PROCESSES?

Code review is one of the main ways that we have to ensure that the production code works. What we do for the majority of the code is there’s a person who writes it, there is a person who reviews it, and also code needs to go through a process called “seconding,” which is where basically the person who has reviewed has signed off on it and said “I think this code is good.” So with code review, you have a little bit of a shared responsibility between the reviewer and the code author.

HOW CLOSELY DO YOU WORK WITH OTHER TEAMS AT JANE STREET?

As a desk dev, I work pretty close to traders, which makes sense because they are my end users. But that doesn’t mean that I’m that removed from the rest of our dev ecosystem. There are a bunch of libraries from other places and apps from other places in the firm that I use. One of the things that is really cool about working at Jane Street is that it’s completely normal to go up to the developer of a library and say, “Hey, you’ve written this library. How do I use it? Could you please show me what to do with it?” Or “I want to expand your library. Is that fine? Could you please review my code?” Also, we socialize together with other devs. We tend to get lunch together, so you can imagine five different devs from a few different groups sitting together at lunch and just discussing general things. It doesn’t need to be conversations about code, but it’s just quite nice to know your colleagues socially. It makes it easier after that to ask questions and to be proactive in fixing things for each other and to just want to work together.