Hi,
If you’re a STEM PhD (or postdoc) looking for a job that combines your quantitative and qualitative skills–like I was when I finished my PhD–I’d encourage you to apply to Jane Street’s Rotational Development Program.
It can be a difficult decision to leave academia, and hard to know what job will be a good fit and how to find it. I remember how tough it was for me when I was looking for jobs as I wrapped up my math PhD. There are lots of opportunities that focus primarily on your quantitative and coding skills–and if you’re interested in those roles, I’d encourage you to apply to Jane Street’s quant researcher, quant trading, and software engineering roles.
But if you’re like me, you may want something more hybrid, a job that requires and exercises your qualitative skills–communication, persuasion, learning and thinking broadly, collaborating together in teams, dealing with ambiguity–in addition to more quantitative skills like working with data, numbers and algorithms.
Jane Street is a quant market-making firm. In plain English, that means we use computers and statistics to help make financial markets efficient by buying when investors want to sell a stock or a bond, and selling when they want to buy. Our culture is intellectual, collaborative, and friendly–in many ways similar to academia.
The Rotational Development Program is part of our Infrastructure group. We’re responsible for the diverse challenges of making sure our business runs–managing new initiatives, understanding and handling our legal obligations, ensuring we process the massive amounts of trades we do–while collaborating with other groups like trading and technology. (I work on the treasury team, which manages and optimizes how we borrow money to fund our trading.) RDPs, as well call them, rotate through a variety of teams within Infrastructure, getting a broad, cross-functional perspective on the firm, before being placed full-time into groups, where we hope they’ll become future leaders of the firm.
We’re writing because we think that STEM PhDs like you offer a great skill set, and we think the RDP program can be a good fit. We’ve already got several STEM PhDs like me within Infrastructure, and we’re eager to hire more. If you’re smart, curious, and gritty, a team player who’s happy to collaborate in a low-ego environment to solve problems while having fun, we’d love you to apply. And if you have friends or colleagues who have these traits–whether they’re a STEM PhD or not–feel free to forward this to them and encourage them to apply as well.
You can find more information on our website. We’re accepting applications from graduating PhDs over the next several months here, for start dates in spring/summer/fall 2021. You’ll need just a one-page resume. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my colleague Cheslea Stagg from our recruiting team at cstagg@janestreet.com.
Best,
Rafe
Rafe Kinsey (Ph.D. Math, University of Michigan, 2014)
Finance & Treasury, Jane Street Group
New York, NY
