I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Jane Street (London, England) in Aug 2021
Interview
Applied online to company website - no specific roles or requirements shown.
Got an email a couple of weeks later asking to set up a phone interview, with a pair programming aspect.
Interviewer was really friendly, asked some basic questions about my experience, then moved on to a couple of worked questions which I wont give but were of medium-high complexity.
The interviewer was far nicer than others I've had and it seemed more like an actual collaborative working scenario than an interview.
I thought it had gone fairly ok but I received a standard rejection email a couple of days later, with no feedback.
It was a very quick and painless process. Recruiter very responsive, kind interviewers. High implementation and difficult problems, so failed onsite after 3 interviews and a Question and Answer Session.
Did not pass the initial coding round. I tried to explain my thought in details to the interviewer but failed to translate my thought into code. So far interviewer is very nice.
I applied online. I interviewed at Jane Street (New York, NY)
Interview
My experience interviewing at Jane Street was definitely challenging, but also surprisingly collaborative. Instead of focusing only on whether I could get the right answer quickly, the interviewers were much more interested in how I approached problems and explained my thinking. I worked through a few coding questions involving data structures and algorithms, and there were also some probability-style questions that tested logical reasoning. The interviewers were clearly very sharp, but they were also approachable and encouraged me to talk through my thought process the entire time. When I got stuck, they would sometimes guide me with small hints so we could keep exploring the problem together. Overall, it felt less like a typical high-pressure interview and more like a thoughtful technical conversation with experienced engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
“What is the expected number of coin flips needed to get two heads in a row?”