Hardware

You design the chips and programmable hardware that Jane Street's trading systems run on, writing the circuits as code and building the tools that test them. The seat sits in the hardware team at Jane Street, which works on both FPGA and ASIC designs. An FPGA is a chip whose circuits can be rewired by loading a new design onto it. An ASIC is a chip built once for a single purpose and cannot be changed afterwards. Both are used where an ordinary program running on a computer would be too slow, for instance in handling network traffic.

The firm treats hardware design as a software problem. It describes its hardware in Hardcaml, a library for the OCaml programming language that lets you write a circuit as code, test it, and produce the RTL from it. RTL stands for register transfer level, the standard low level description of a digital circuit that chip tools understand. You do not need to know Hardcaml before you start.