Jane Street interns make more than Keir Starmer and Jay Powell

FT Alphaville was moseying around Jane Street’s website today, as you do, and took a look at some of its current job openings.

There are a lot of them, highlighting just how quickly the firm is growing at the moment — even after doubling in size since 2021. There are 58 positions open in New York alone, for everything from Linux engineers and options traders to an interior designer.

Many of the roles list a base salary range of $250,000 to $300,000, with the important caveat that this “is only one part of Jane Street total compensation, which includes an annual discretionary bonus”.

We gather that this bonus can be a multiple of the annual salary. In its latest loan docs, Jane Street disclosed compensation and benefits of $2.4bn last year, which works out to over $900k for each employee on average. And that’s just the grunts. The 40 equity partners get to share the billions of dollars’ worth of profits that Jane Street currently spits out.

However, what really jumped out was the frankly silly numbers that Jane Street is now offering graduate trainees and interns. Here one for a quantitative research internship in New York, which doesn’t even require any finance industry experience.

That’s not a typo. An annualised base salary of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. For an internship. Where research experience is “a plus”.

There are also ads for a software engineering internship and a machine learning researcher summer gig that also pay $250k a year (pro-rata’d, it comes in at ca $21,000 a month). Even a lowly trading desk operations engineering internship at Jane Street pays a base annualised salary of $175k. And that’s before various perks, like the apparently generous signing-on bonuses.

To put this in context, the UK prime minister is currently paid £172,153 ($224,528 at pixel time), roughly split between the salary they get as a member of parliament and as the head of government.

In other words, Sir Keir Starmer currently makes less a month than many of the interns at Jane Street. And yes, sure, he gets to live for free (though we are unreliably informed that until recently 10 Downing Street looked like a “crack den”). And yes, his role does seem to come with an awful lot of other freebies. But Jane Street’s free canteen is supposed to make French chefs faint with envy (though it may not have as good a wine cellar).

Curious as to how Jane Street’s internships compare to other prominent jobs, we found out that the chair of the Federal Reserve makes $203,500. The secretary-general of NATO currently makes a €317,707 a year, and that’s apparently tax free.

But if you’re in it for the money, you’re better off with a Jane Street internship than leading the US central bank or chairing the world’s ninth-largest island. Just brush up on your puzzle-solving skills first.

Further reading:
— How Jane Street rode the ETF wave to ‘obscene’ riches