Jane Street's interns on $4.8k per week are getting a $1k pay rise
Jane Street has long cemented itself as one of the most attractive places to intern in finance, and the good times are getting better still. Base-pay offers for some internships at the electronic trading firm have increased.
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Thanks to salary transparency laws in New York, we can see that the base salary for Jane Street's top paying internships have increased from $250k, as we reported last year, to $300k. Internships with those salaries include quant traders, quant researchers, machine learning engineers, software engineers and FPGA engineers. These quants and engineers will now be earning $5.8k per week, on par with the top available salary for Citadel Securities' PhD quant research interns.
Of course, salary is just one aspect of intern compensation, and it isn't always the biggest. Jane Street pays interns sign-on bonuses as well; Offers from previous years verified by Levels.fyi show bonuses of $10k and $8k from a few years ago, while unverified figures on Levels claim sign-on bonuses of up to $25k. Bonuses vary from intern to intern, and it's not inconceivable that total compensation hasn't actually changed much in spite of the salary rise if the money has been moved over from the bonus pool. It's also possible that sign-on bonuses have stayed flat or even increased, however.
More guaranteed compensation for interns might be influenced by Jane Street's recent bad press surrounding a lucrative trading strategy employed in India's options market. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is investigating the firm and has banned it from the market after it made $4.3bn in a two-year period from one strategy. Interning at Jane Street is suddenly riskier than it was a few months ago, and increased pay might tempt top students who are on the fence to apply.
It might be influenced by the SEBI saga in a different way. Daniel Spottiswood, one of the two traders who implemented that strategy, was himself a former intern and graduate hire. He left Jane Street for hedge fund Millennium, and was sued by his former firm for taking the strategy with them. The move reportedly involved massive pay packages; perhaps the decision to pay staff more from the ground up is meant to incur more loyalty and prevent fewer departures like Spottiswood's.
The answer may be simpler, however. Jane Street doubled its trading revenue in 2024, bringing in $20.5bn, and might have simply justified a little extra expenditure on its interns as a result.
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