Jane Street hires Quant Trader, Software Engineer and Quant Researcher. Candidates report 6 interview stages. Below: what each round tests and how to prepare, the path by track, the timeline, pay and a 4-week prep plan, drawn from candidate reports and Jane Street's own recruiting pages.
Jane Street interview: quick answer
- Stages6
- Online assessment~30 min · probability & mental math · reported in some cycles and tracks
- TimelineJane Street says a recruiter usually replies within a few days of an application and that you should hear back within about a week after each interview.
- Final roundSuper Day: a full day of interviews with traders (market-making games, then coding and data questions), in the office or on video
- Pay (candidate-reported)Quant Trader, New grad (post-intern FT): $500k – $800k total comp
- RolesQuant Trader, Software Engineer, Quant Researcher
Preparing for Jane Street? Work the rounds in order in the free Jane Street interview funnel, or start with the free online-assessment sample (no signup).
The Jane Street interview process at a glance
| # | Round | Format and length | Prep |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pre-interview Assessment | ~30 min · probability & mental math · reported in some cycles and tracks | OA guidePractice |
| 2 | Phone Round 1 Brain Teasers | 45 min · video call | GuidePractice |
| 3 | Phone Round 2 Brain Teasers | 45 min · video call | GuidePractice |
| 4 | Phone Round 3 Hard Probability Deep-Dive | 45 min · video call · one problem | GuidePractice |
| 5 | Super Day Morning Market-Making Games | Onsite - 2-3 live mock-trading games | GuidePractice |
| 6 | Super Day Afternoon Coding & Data Science | Onsite - coding + data-science rounds (if you advance) | GuidePractice |
Stages are listed in the order candidates report them. Formats come from candidate reports and change between cycles, offices and teams; not every candidate sees every stage.
How the Jane Street process differs by track
Jane Street runs separate loops for different roles. Here is the path each track reports, in order:
- Quant Trader (6 stages): Pre-interview Assessment → Phone Round 1 → Phone Round 2 → Phone Round 3 → Super Day Morning → Super Day Afternoon
Jane Street describes phone interviews as the first step for trading; the short written assessment is reported only in some cycles, and not everyone gets a third call. - Software Engineer: Jane Street says software engineering candidates solve coding problems in their own setup and language; the phone-then-final-day structure is similar, with coding in place of trading games.
- Quant Researcher: Jane Street says research interviews mix trading-style probability questions with software engineering. Candidates report the same phone-first start as trading.
Not sure which track fits you? See quant trader vs quant researcher.
Every Jane Street round: what it tests and how to prepare
1Pre-interview Assessment
Candidates report this short written screen in some cycles and tracks. Jane Street's own pages describe a trading process that starts with phone interviews and mention no test, so many applicants never receive one. Where it is reported, it is a timed set of probability, expected-value and mental-math questions, not a coding test, and the reasoning is graded as well as the answer.
How to prepare
- Show the Bayesian update or the expected-value computation - the reasoning is graded, not just the number.
- Drill mental arithmetic; the numeracy questions are timed with no calculator.
- If no test link arrives, that is normal: Jane Street describes phone interviews as the first step of its trading process.
2Phone Round 1: Brain Teasers
Opening conversational phone round. Three to five brain-teaser / probability questions, intentionally easier than later rounds. They're checking baseline reasoning: does the candidate frame the problem cleanly and think clearly out loud?
- For trading candidates the process starts here: Jane Street describes phone interviews as the first step.
- Expect probability and expected-value questions talked through out loud with a trader.
Question types: mostly expectation, probability and combinatorics, especially discrete probability, expected value, independence and symmetry. Latest candidate report for this round: Feb 2026.
How to prepare
- Easier ≠ easy. They're calibrating, not gifting. Frame each problem out loud: state the random variable, the event, the question. The framing IS the signal.
- Think aloud constantly. Silent calculation reads as stuck.
- Pace ~5–8 min per question. If you're past 10 min on one, propose your current approach and ask if they'd like you to push further or move on.
Full Phone Round 1 guide →Practice this round (75 questions) →
3Phone Round 2: Brain Teasers
Multiple independent brain-teaser questions back-to-back: they don't build on each other, so you can't lean on context from one problem to the next. Probability-heavy with a sprinkle of game theory or combinatorics. Pacing matters as much as the answers.
Question types: mostly probability, expectation and game theory, especially expected value, discrete probability, conditional probability and combinatorics. Latest candidate report for this round: Feb 2026.
How to prepare
- Show range. Expect a mix: pure probability, simple game theory, a Fermi estimation, maybe a Bayesian update. They want to see breadth, not depth in one technique.
- Aim for 5–7 questions in 45 min. That implies ~6–8 min each. Long silences here are penalized more than wrong-but-recoverable answers.
Watch out: Reset between questions. Each problem starts fresh — explicitly clear your whiteboard / restate the new setup. Carrying assumptions over is the most common mistake here.
Full Phone Round 2 guide →Practice this round (75 questions) →
4Phone Round 3: Hard Probability Deep-Dive
One hard probability problem. You'll spend the full 45 minutes on it. Often Markov chains, optional stopping, martingales, or a clever generating-function trick: the kind of problem that doesn't have a clean closed form, where the depth of the conversation is the signal more than the final number.
- Not every candidate gets a third call. Reports put the phone stage at two or three interviews.
Question types: mostly expectation, probability and combinatorics, especially expected value, conditional probability, first-passage and stopping times and discrete probability. Latest candidate report for this round: Feb 2026.
How to prepare
- Lead with structure. State the state space, the random variable, the target. Spend 3–5 min framing BEFORE attacking — interviewers visibly relax when they see clean framing.
- Optional-stopping theorem. Re-derive the three conditions cold (bounded stopping time, OR bounded martingale, OR uniform integrability). Knowing WHEN you can apply OST scores more points than the application itself.
Full Phone Round 3 guide →Practice this round (41 questions) →
5Super Day Morning: Market-Making Games
The day opens with two or three live market-making games, the real gate: you quote a two-sided market on an uncertain value, the interviewer trades against you, and you update quotes and manage inventory as order flow arrives. They watch number sense, pricing under uncertainty and handling being picked off. Lunch follows; a weak morning usually ends the day.
- The final day is a full day of interviews, in the office or on video, with quantitative traders.
- Market-making games and probability questions feature, along with a conversation about your general interests.
Question types: mostly game theory, optimization and expectation, especially expected value, convex optimization, market microstructure and conditional probability. Latest candidate report for this round: Feb 2026.
How to prepare
- Quote tight but protect yourself - widen when you are unsure, and skew your market as inventory builds.
- Think in expected value out loud; they care about your reasoning and adjustment, not a single 'right' price.
- Practice the mock-trading game in Market Games before the day.
Full Super Day Morning guide →Practice this round (26 questions) →
6Super Day Afternoon: Coding & Data Science
Candidates who clear the morning games move to the afternoon: hands-on coding problems and data-science / statistics questions (clean implementation, reasoning about data, light modelling). There is no separate final wrap-up - the whole day is one long super-round of back-to-back interviews, and this technical block is the last of it.
- Jane Street lists coding (in any language) and data analysis among final-round topics.
Question types: mostly coding, statistics and regression, especially data structures, time series, hypothesis testing and complexity analysis. Latest candidate report for this round: Feb 2026.
How to prepare
- Write clean, correct code and talk through edge cases; production work is OCaml-flavored but the round is language-flexible.
- For the data-science part, be ready to reason about a dataset and justify a simple model, not just recite theory.
Full Super Day Afternoon guide →Practice this round (99 questions) →
Practice the Jane Street rounds in order
Each round in the Jane Street funnel has its own practice set, with worked solutions and progress tracking. A free account saves your progress across rounds.
Timeline
Jane Street says a recruiter normally gets in touch within a few days of an application, and that you should hear back within about a week after each interview. It does not schedule interviews on weekends.
Common misconceptions
- You need a finance background. Jane Street says no prior finance knowledge is expected, and outside guides agree.
- You must code in OCaml. Jane Street lets you interview in any language and advises against trying OCaml for the first time in an interview.
Intern vs full-time
One outside guide reports that the internship process follows the same steps as the full-time one, with the final day held in the New York or London office, and that return offers are decided at the end of the internship. Jane Street does not publish a separate intern process.
A 4-week Jane Street prep plan
Built from the order of Jane Street's rounds and the topics in each round's practice set. Compress it if your first interview is sooner.
| When | Focus | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Foundations | Review expectation, probability and coding, the topics that dominate Jane Street's practice sets. Start with Probability course and Quant coding course. Work the easy and medium questions in the Jane Street question set. |
| Week 2 | Early rounds: Pre-interview Assessment, Phone Round 1, Phone Round 2 and Phone Round 3 | Practice probability, expectation and combinatorics under time pressure, and take the free OA sample (format notes in the OA guide). Add a daily mental-math drill. Talk every answer through out loud; interviewers score the reasoning. |
| Week 3 | Later rounds: Super Day Morning and Super Day Afternoon | Move to coding, statistics and game theory. Rehearse quoting markets with the Make a Market game and read the market-making game guide. Do timed coding sessions in your interview language. Read how quant superdays work. |
| Week 4 | Rehearse the full loop | Run each practice round in order, redo the questions you missed, and prepare two project stories plus a specific answer to "why Jane Street?" (see behavioral questions at trading firms). |
Jane Street pay
| Role | Level | Total comp | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quant Trader | New grad (post-intern FT) | $500k – $800k | Famously high. Sign-on + first-year bonus often outsized vs peers. |
| Quant Researcher | New grad (BS/MS/PhD) | $500k – $800k | QR comp tracks trader comp closely at Jane Street — the two tracks are genuinely peer-level in pay, not the trader-favored hierarchy you see at some firms. |
| Software Engineer | New grad (BS/MS) | $400k – $600k | SWE comp is also high — Jane Street pays both tracks well, not just traders. |
| Quant Trader / QR — top performer | Mid (3–5 yrs) | $1.5M – $4M+ | Wide variance. Year-3+ top performers can hit $3M–$4M+ in strong years; median is materially lower. Trader and QR mid-level bands track each other closely (a function of the collaborative culture). |
Total compensation means base salary plus bonus and any sign-on, as candidates self-report it. Job postings usually show base salary only, so posted figures and outside salary pages often look lower. These are rough ranges, NOT offers or guarantees. Jane Street trader comp has wide variance (year + desk dependent). Intern conversion offers tend to be at the higher end of the band. Source: Candidate self-reports aggregated from levels.fyi, Glassdoor, and community Discord — not employer-verified. Last updated May 22, 2026.
Full breakdown by level: Jane Street salary guide.
Jane Street teams and what their interviews test
Jane Street is a market maker first, but the trading desks, research, and engineering teams are unusually entwined. New hires are typed by track (trader / SWE / researcher) more than by desk; placement onto a specific desk happens after onboarding.
| Teams | What it does | What its interviews test |
|---|---|---|
| Trading Desks Quant Trader | Multiple desks, mostly organized by asset class (ETF, options, listed equities, fixed income, FX). Quote two-sided markets, own real-time risk + P&L. | The mock trading game lives here. Bid/ask reasoning, inventory management, sizing under uncertainty. Expect mental arithmetic without a calculator. |
| Quant Research Quant Researcher | Build the signals + pricing models the traders use. More directly P&L-tied than Two Sigma-style research, less open-ended. | Probability theory deep-dives, expected value, conditional reasoning. Less ML-heavy than Two Sigma. |
| Software Engineering Software Engineer | Production trading systems in OCaml. Internal tooling, market data, simulation. World's largest commercial OCaml deployment. | Coding round emphasizes clean abstractions + types. Any language you know well is accepted in the interview; OCaml fluency a plus, not required. |
| Strategy & Business Development Strategy / BizOps | New product launches, exchange partnerships, capacity planning, regulatory work. Non-engineering function. | Mostly behavioral + estimation. Not a primary technical-interview track for new grads. |
About Jane Street
| Firm type | Single-firm prop trading (no outside capital) |
|---|---|
| Trading style | Mixed (discretionary + systematic) · Mid-frequency (ETF + options market making) |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
| Other offices | London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam |
| Net trading rev. | ~$20.5B (2024) |
| Employees | ~3,000 (end-2024) |
| Reported performance | $20.5B NTR (2024); 2025 a record (~$39.6B reported) |
| How the trading process starts | Phone interviews, according to Jane Street's trading interview page |
| Phone rounds | Usually two or three; the number varies by candidate |
| Interview language | Any language you know well, per Jane Street |
| Decision speed | About a week after each interview, per Jane Street |
Founded 2000
Jane Street was founded in 2000 by a small group, several of whom came out of Susquehanna. Started in ETF market making and scaled into one of the largest proprietary trading firms globally. Still privately held.
Tech stack — OCaml everywhere
Jane Street is the world's largest commercial OCaml user. Trading systems, internal tooling, and most production code run on OCaml. Python is used for data analysis. The OCaml-first culture is unusual; Jane Street lets candidates interview in any language they know well, so OCaml is not required.
Position in the market
Public coverage suggests Jane Street trades a meaningful share of US ETF and listed-options volume daily. Famously secretive on actual P&L; they don't take outside money and don't disclose results.
Culture and leadership
Flat-ish hierarchy by trading-firm standards. Strong intern-to-FT pipeline — most new hires come through the summer internship.
Culture
Unusually centralized and collaborative. No real silo between 'trader' and 'researcher' — many people move between tracks. OCaml-first stack reinforces a single-codebase, single-toolkit culture.
What the interviews feel like
Conversational and game-theoretic — they're checking how you think under uncertainty, not whether you remember Bayes' formula. The mock trading game is the signature filter. Mental arithmetic comes up without a calculator, but clear reasoning out loud matters more than raw speed.
Practice for Jane Street on QuantVault
Practice
Courses
Games and drills
Further reading
- How quant superdays work
- Market-making game interview guide
- Mental math for trading interviews
- Fermi estimation questions
- Behavioral questions at trading firms
- The quant interview process, explained
Similar firms to compare
Firms with a similar business and interview style. Many candidates interview at several of them in the same cycle.
Sources and how this guide is built
- Updated October 20, 2026; firm data last reviewed May 22, 2026; pay last updated May 22, 2026.
- Round detail draws on 164 questions candidates report from Jane Street interviews (the most recent report across all rounds is from Jul 2026). A separate curated Jane Street question set of 112 problems collects the most useful practice for this firm.
- Jane Street's own pages: Interviewing at Jane Street · Trading interviews, including a mock interview video.
- Public candidate reports and outside interview guides are cross-checked against each other. Where they disagree the page says "reports differ"; details from a single source are marked as candidate reports.
- No actual interview questions are reproduced on this page. The questions, with worked solutions, are in the practice rounds.
Jane Street interview FAQ
How many rounds are in the Jane Street interview?
Candidates report 6 stages: Pre-interview Assessment, Phone Round 1, Phone Round 2, Phone Round 3, Super Day Morning, Super Day Afternoon. The exact number varies by cycle and team.
How long does the Jane Street interview process take?
Jane Street says a recruiter usually replies within a few days of an application and that you should hear back within about a week after each interview.
Does the Jane Street process differ by role?
Yes. Quant Trader: Pre-interview Assessment, Phone Round 1, Phone Round 2, Phone Round 3, Super Day Morning, Super Day Afternoon. Software Engineer: Jane Street says software engineering candidates solve coding problems in their own setup and language; the phone-then-final-day structure is similar, with coding in place of trading games. Quant Researcher: Jane Street says research interviews mix trading-style probability questions with software engineering. Candidates report the same phone-first start as trading.
How much does Jane Street pay?
Candidate-reported total compensation: Quant Trader (New grad (post-intern FT)) $500k – $800k; Quant Researcher (New grad (BS/MS/PhD)) $500k – $800k; Software Engineer (New grad (BS/MS)) $400k – $600k; Quant Trader / QR — top performer (Mid (3–5 yrs)) $1.5M – $4M+. These are self-reported totals including bonus, not offers; job postings usually list base salary only.
How should I prepare for the Jane Street interview?
Prepare round by round over about four weeks: foundations first, then the early rounds (Pre-interview Assessment, Phone Round 1, Phone Round 2), then the later rounds, then a full rehearsal. Each round has its own practice set on QuantVault, and the online assessment has a dedicated guide.
What does Jane Street do?
Jane Street is a single-firm prop trading firm headquartered in New York, NY. Jane Street was founded in 2000 by a small group, several of whom came out of Susquehanna. Started in ETF market making and scaled into one of the largest proprietary trading firms globally.
Is there an online test in the Jane Street process?
Reports differ. Jane Street's own pages describe a trading process that begins with phone interviews and do not mention a test, and one outside guide says trader applicants go straight to phone games. QuantVault candidate reports from some cycles describe a short written probability screen before the calls. If no test link arrives, that is normal.
Can I reapply to Jane Street?
Yes. Jane Street says students who were not successful should wait at least a year before applying again.
Which programming language should I use?
Jane Street says you can use any language. Pick the one you are strongest in rather than learning OCaml for the interview.
Do I need to know finance?
No. Jane Street says it does not expect finance knowledge, and an outside guide says the same.
Are Jane Street interviews held on weekends?
No. Jane Street says it does not interview on weekends.
How many phone interviews are there?
Usually two or three. Jane Street does not publish a fixed number, and candidate reports vary.
Is there a fit interview in the final round?
Yes. Alongside the technical rounds, the final day includes a conversation about your background and general interests.
Start preparing for Jane Street
Open the interactive Jane Street interview funnel: every stage with its practice set, from the first screen to the final round. Create a free account to save your progress.