Trading at the Speed of… Chat? with Chloe Casale

Chloe Casale was planning to be an auto mechanic before taking an intro CS class on a bet. After a stint as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir, Chloe came to Jane Street with no background in OCaml or finance. Now she leads a team of “desk devs” building tools for client-facing traders. In this episode, Ron and Chloe discuss how a surprising amount of Jane Street’s client business is conducted via chat, and the promise and perils of using LLMs to automate that trading. They dive deep on hiring and interviewing: does Jane Street’s process select for less “spiky” kinds of people than Palantir’s? Along the way, they marvel at Webs, an internal spreadsheet-like framework for composing computations and building UIs (which, you can see, is sort of hard to explain); compare building software for internal versus external customers; and recount the tale of Chloe’s epic 1,000km horse race across the Mongolian steppe.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• The Mongol Derby
• Bonsai
• Slang
• Preparing for a Software Engineering interview at Jane Street
• A Day in the Life of a Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer