Jane Street · Primly Community

How I'd prep for the Jane Street interview if I started over from scratch

veteran_vance · 6 replies

I've now been through the Jane Street process twice: once in 2023 (rejected at phone screen) and once in 2025 (offer, declined). Here's what I'd do differently starting from zero.

First thing to understand: this is not a Leetcode grind company. Yes, there's coding, and yes, it needs to be good, but the path to passing isn't hammering Leetcode mediums. The path is being genuinely fluent in functional programming, having solid probability intuition, and being able to reason clearly under pressure.

OCaml first, before anything else. They use OCaml internally and the coding rounds are in OCaml. Get comfortable enough to write idiomatic OCaml quickly. I'd suggest actually building a small project, not just doing exercises. Real-Ocaml.org is solid. Budget 6-8 weeks if you're coming from Python or Java.

Probability and combinatorics. Work through the Jane Street puzzle archive, they post them publicly. Also work through classic quant interview books like Heard on the Street or anything by Mark Joshi. The expected value problems and Bayesian reasoning questions are real and they matter.

Simulate the trading round specifically. Find someone to roleplay market-making with you. Practice quoting bid/ask spreads on made-up problems. Explain why you'd move your price given new information. This sounds weird but it's a specific skill and it's learnable.

Think out loud constantly. Every problem, every day, narrate what you're doing. Jane Street interviews are as much about how you reason as what you arrive at. Interviewers are evaluating your thinking process.

Behavioral prep. Don't skip this. They do ask it, and they want specific examples of how you've handled ambiguous problems. The typical STAR format works here.

The loop is long and genuinely hard. But it's also one of the most intellectually interesting interview processes I've done. Worth the effort even if you end up elsewhere.

6 replies

infra_ines

The puzzle archive tip is underrated. Those puzzles aren't just fun, they're actually calibrated to the kind of probabilistic reasoning they're looking for in the interview. If you can work through them comfortably you're in good shape for the probability round.

pivot_pat

What level of probability knowledge do you need going in? Like, is this undergrad stats or more advanced?

veteran_vance

Undergrad probability plus some combinatorics is the core. You should know: conditional probability, Bayes theorem, expected value, basic distributions. You don't need measure-theoretic probability. But you need to be fast and intuitive with the basics, not just able to apply formulas.

ds_dmitri

The market-making simulation practice is a genuinely good idea that nobody does. Even a couple of hours practicing that specific format makes a huge difference. It feels awkward at first.

mobile_mara

How much systems design is there? I keep seeing conflicting info on whether they do a serious systems round.

veteran_vance

For the SWE track there is a systems round but it's more conceptual than the FAANG-style design-a-Twitter interview. Less UML, more: here's a trading scenario, what are the constraints and tradeoffs. Know your fundamentals: latency, throughput, concurrency, consistency tradeoffs.