Quantitative analysis · Researcher

You build the statistical and machine learning models that Jane Street uses to price and trade financial instruments, working from very large sets of market data. This is a permanent seat for someone who already has research experience with data. Researchers sit a few feet from the engineers and traders, and together the three train models, design systems and run trading strategies. Your findings are meant to end up as strategies that trade, so the work is judged on whether the models help the firm trade well, not on the research alone.

A financial instrument is anything that can be traded, such as a share, a bond or an option. To price it is to work out what it is worth right now, and a model is the piece of maths or software that turns data into that estimate or into a prediction of where the price goes next.