How to Land a Quant Trading Internship at Jane Street

Introduction

Welcome to The Quant Guide! Designed by a team of quants, we provide the world’s #1 quant trading and research interview preparation program — from resume development, to teaching the math behind every interview concept, to giving access to the 500+ actual interview questions bank, we teach you everything from how to get interviews and then how to crush them.

In this post, we’re sitting down with a student who landed a quant trading internship at Jane Street for the coming summer. Jane Street generally offers 2 internships cycles — one in the winter, and one in the summer. The internship is a great way to secure a full-time job. You can learn about Jane Street's internship postings here.

Q&A with Jane Street Intern

Hey, can you give us an intro about yourself?

Yeah, sure! I’m a undergrad junior at a non-target university. I’m studying data science, with a minor in CS. I think I might also take some math classes in my last year and a half. I’m going to be interning at Jane Street this upcoming summer and I could not be more hyped!

Was this your first quant interview cycle?

I’ve always been super interested in quant opportunities, but didn’t know how to actually get interviews from firms. 2 years ago, I had applied to quant internships and didn’t get any interviews.

Last year, I started working with Quant Blueprint and learned that I needed to reconstruct my resume quite a bit. I created a completely separate Quant resume (separate from my Data Science resume) and added the full suite of projects and keywords that the The Quant Guide recommended. This time, when I applied my junior year, I first applied to Jane Street, SIG, and Optiver. I got an interview at Jane Street and an Online Assessment from SIG and Optiver.

What was the structure of your Jane Street interview process?

I had a total of 4 rounds (3 phone interviews, and 1 on-site interview). All of my interviews focused on probability, betting, expected value, strategy, brainteasers, market-making, and some behavioral questions. I’d say there was a 90%-10% split between the more "mathy" interview questions and the behavioral interview questions (which I just had on my onsite). The behavioral questions focused more on my general reasons for pursuing quant trading and my expectations from the summer. Here’s a breakdown of my interviews:

• Phone Interview #1: 1 brainteaser and 2 probability questions
• Phone Interview #2: 2 probability questions, 1 expected value question (with some involved follow-ups)
• Phone Interview #3: 1 brainteaser, 2 probability questions, 1 betting/strategy question
• On-site interview: mix of betting/strategy games with a variety of market-making questions, complex probability questions, and some behavioral questions

Unlike what I expected given the rumors behind quant finance, I didn’t have ANY explicit mental math questions.

How’d you prepare for the technical interview questions?

From my experience, I think there are 2 very important skills that are needed to do well on Jane Street’s Quant Trading interview questions:

1. strong probability intuition
2. risk-taking intuition (for the betting, strategy games)

I used to think I could just read my school’s Stats 110 textbook, or just read a probability textbook to prep for the interviews. It’s really not that straightforward. The questions that these interviews ask are not highly theoretical probability questions that stats textbooks teach you. They're testing for more quick decision-making and risk-taking intuition.

I think the most valuable interview preparation for me was going through the course and then spending a lot of time on the provided interview question bank. The lectures do a really good job of not just teaching the theory, but also giving a really good structure to break down the betting and strategy questions. It’s also really helpful just hearing a quant trader talk about their thinking process when it comes to the betting and risk-taking questions. This made me a lot more comfortable with the betting games and risk-taking intuition part of the interview process.

Going through the interview question bank also really helped with giving me reps of the different question types. Also saw more than a handful of super similar questions from the bank in my interviews.

What advice would you give to students applying and going through the interview process?

Confidence is key, and the only way you develop confidence is by getting hundreds of reps in. Just like getting good at literally anything, to get good at quant interviews, you need to spend time doing hundreds of real practice questions. By the time you get through the interview question bank, you’ll probably be at the point where you have a generally good idea of a few approaches to answer any given question. This is pretty powerful, because then you can cross-check your answer with 2 different approaches, and be extremely confident in your answer if they line up.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! If you're interested in Quant Trading or Quant Research opportunities at High Frequency Trading (HFT) firms or Hedge Funds, then enrolling in Quant Blueprint's Ultimate Quant Finance Interview Preparation Program is probably one of the best, highest EV steps you can take. If you have any additional questions, schedule a call with one of our quants off of the home page, or email us at team@quantblueprint.com.