About the opportunity
The Linux Engineer internship is a systems role focused on the critical infrastructure beneath Jane Street’s technology, including production trading systems. The team often works close to the operating-system layer and may go as deep as firmware or physical hardware when a problem requires it.
What the work can look like
A normal problem might involve tracing a performance issue from an application all the way down to hardware, fixing a kernel bug, responding to a live datacentre problem, improving monitoring with data analysis, or automating a process that was previously manual.
Most of the internship is spent on one substantial project with experienced engineers. Jane Street gives concrete examples of previous work: testing filesystem resilience at scale, automating diagnostic collection from early-boot failures, building systems for extremely fine-grained TCP diagnostics, and extending infrastructure provisioning to support new types of compute capacity.
Interns also participate in real-time operational work, including production incidents and root-cause analysis. This gives direct exposure to how the Linux team interacts with many other groups across the firm.
What Jane Street looks for
You should understand operating-system fundamentals and computer architecture, know core systems concepts such as sockets, virtual memory, and process lifecycles, and understand basic network protocols. Comfort with the Linux command line, logs, process inspection, and system troubleshooting is expected. Jane Street also wants people who naturally solve problems by writing code, regardless of programming language, and who care about robust software engineering.
