How to get a job at Jane Street
In the past few years, electronic trading firms have gone from fringe financial powerhouses to household names. Among the best known is Jane Street, which made a record-breaking $10bn in trading revenues for the second quarter of last year and ranked first in our Ideal Employer report for both electronic trading and compensation.
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Jane Street employs over 3,000 people and has received unwelcome publicity after a regulator in India accused one of its most profitable strategies of manipulating the market. In Q2 and Q3 of 2025, it made $16.9bn in trading revenue and $10.6bn in net income. It paid an average of over $600k per head in Q3 alone.
As Jane Street's revenues swell, it's been expanding its offices in Hong Kong and London. It's also ramped up its machine learning hiring, having amassed a fleet of over 5,000 GPUs. Jane Street made its name as a high-frequency trading firm, but it now does much more. Last year, it made circa $830m in Q3 with venture capital style investments in Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude. It's therefore both a proprietary trading firm, a market maker and a venture capital firm.
Getting a job there isn't easy.
Who does Jane Street hire?
Jane Street didn't respond to requests to comment for this article. Its primary recruitment sources are its graduate and intern programs; it hired students from 103 universities across 24 countries in its latest intern class. It's not clear exactly how many interns Jane Street brought in last year, but it hired roughly 400 in 2023 and has expanded the program since then.
Top schools for Jane Street interns include MIT and Harvard in the US, Oxford and Cambridge in Europe, as well as NUS and the University of Hong Kong in Asia. When we analyzed interns from its 2025 class in particular, Stanford and the University of Chicago were the most popular.
Jane Street overwhelmingly hires undergraduates, but will hire masters students on occasion, particularly for specialist roles like FPGA engineering. PhDs aren't very popular in prop trading, and Jane Street is no exception. The two most popular subjects for Jane Street interns are mathematics (most common for trading roles) and computer science (most common for engineering roles).
Jane Street makes fewer experienced hires. Not many people that join Jane Street full-time ever leave, so there's limited need to replace its experienced people.
What questions does Jane Street ask in interviews?
Jane Street, and prop trading firms in general, are famous for asking unusual brainteasers in their interview processes that test both your ability to understand markets, and your ability to see through irrelevant noise.
Questions that Jane Street asks often have multiple parts. If you get the first part wrong, they will tell you, and the follow-up that you get will sometimes depend on how right you were. Jane Street provides a mock interview on its website, revealing another multi-part problem that it previously asked in interviews (but has since phased out of the process):
"You have a 20-sided die with the 1 facing upwards. You have 100 turns where you can either:
a.) Roll the dice.
b.) Take an amount of money from the Casino equivalent to the number facing upwards.
How do you play this game to maximize your earnings?"
The mock candidate asked multiple questions first to get a full understanding of the problem; she asked whether you have to pay to roll the dice, and asked whether there was anything stopping you from taking the money every time if you happened to roll a 20. She said her calculations out loud, analyzing how much she expects to get from different strategies.
She opted to roll until she got an 18 or above, then taking the money until her 100 turns were up. This then led to a follow-up question:
"Now, the game changes so that, if you take the money, the die is taken off the board and must be rolled again before you can take the money. How does your strategy change."
Again, the interviewee walked the interviewer through her thought process. As the question became more complex, she used algebra to create a function that would ascertain the optimal minimum number at which to take the money to maximize profit. The interviewer didn't ask her to carry out the rest of the calculations from that point, then noted that she was on the right track and told her the answer (accepting the money on anything six or above).
He also said that there was an easier method she could have used. The interviewee could have simply calculated the expected return of taking the money at every opportunity, regardless of the result of the roll (which was roughly $5), and taken any number above that average.
The interviewer then asked a third and final part of the question:
"Now, we revert to the previous rules where the dice stays on the table, but the Casino gets to play. When you take the money, it can choose to reroll the dice without costing you a turn. Assuming it tries to minimize its losses, how does your strategy change?"
The interviewer notes that there isn't necessarily a right answer here, and this segment instead became more of a discussion about different potential strategies and what they could yield, with the candidate settling on a solution she believed to be the most optimal.
Jane Street is tight-lipped around questions that are currently in circulation; some applicants via Glassdoor have claimed to sign NDAs as part of the process, but others have given a few examples. One multi-part question via Glassdoor is:
"You have 20 cards. 1 is black, the rest are red. You keep drawing cards and get $1 for each red, but if you draw the black, the game ends and you get nothing. How do you play, and what’s the average payout?
Now drawing the black card makes your score go negative, but you can continue drawing cards. What’s the strategy and expected payout now?"
For engineers, the process will be more technical and often involve both leetcode-style questions and more technical systems design questions. You'll also, regardless of role, be asked a number of behavioural questions. Examples of all these can be found here.
How much does Jane Street pay?
A lot. It paid each employee an average of $1.4m in 2024, and is on track to far exceed that in 2025.
Jane Street's intern have had a pay rise. Monthly pay for the top roles like traders and software engineers rose from $4.8k in 2025 to $5.8k for the upcoming class, according to job listings for its internships earlier this year.
The top people at Jane Street are earning magnitudes of this. In the firm's UK-based limited partnership, average pay for employees was $1.1m last year, but partners earned $19.6m on average.
Jane Street did not respond to a request for comment.
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