About the Position
We're looking to hire a programmer-who-writes, or a writer-who-codes.
Here are the kinds of things we’d like to have this person work on:
- Documentation. We’ve always believed that developers should spend time and effort documenting their own code, but at the same time, a great writer with a feel for the technology can raise the level of quality in a way that few developers can. Establishing a culture of great docs is especially important as we grow.
- Building tools that support documentation. So much documentation is auto-generated by our systems, whether as error messages, logs, automated emails, or library docstrings. Getting your hands dirty hacking on documentation-adjacent tools will help not just to a first order, but will also make your other writing more effective.
- Training material. We have a ton of programs that new and experienced hires go through, ranging from an OCaml Bootcamp to Dev Teach-ins that expose students to interesting technical problems from around the company. Part of the job is to make these better and mint more of them where valuable.
- Writing longer pieces. We need more tutorials and overviews on a variety of topics. We have an internal developer handbook that we’re writing, with a backlog of chapters—each one an opportunity to dive deep into some part of our stack. But there’s also a lot of external writing to be done, for instance on our blog, our programming podcast, for conferences, recruiting events, and more.
In terms of skills, we want someone who is both an excellent writer and good enough at programming to navigate our codebase, work through our tutorials, and write up examples. You might spend meaningful time embedded as an engineer on one of our projects, just to understand how we write software. But experience with functional programming, expressive type systems, OCaml, or finance are all unnecessary—we’re happy to teach you about these things here.
If you're a recruiting agency and want to partner with us, please reach out to [email protected].
Top Skills
What We Do
Jane Street works differently. As a liquidity provider and market maker, we trade on more than 200 trading venues across 45 countries and help form the backbone of global markets. Our approach is rooted in technology and rigorous quantitative analysis, but our success is driven by our people.
Our bright, beautiful offices in the heart of New York, London, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam are open and buzzing with conversation. We come from many backgrounds and encourage travel between offices to share perspectives. Some of our best ideas come from bumping into a visiting colleague at the office coffee bar.
Markets move fast. Staying competitive as we’ve grown has required constant invention—of new trading strategies, technology, and processes. We’ve found this is easier when you hire humble, kind people. They tend to help each other, and prioritize teamwork over titles.
We invest heavily in teaching and training. There’s a library and a classroom in every office, because deepening your understanding of something is considered real work. Guest lectures, classes, and conferences round out the intellectual exchanges that happen every day.
People grow into long careers at Jane Street because there are always new and interesting problems to solve, systems to build, and theories to test. More than twenty years after our founding, it still feels like we’re just getting started.
