Episode notes
In Young Cho thought she was going to be a doctor but fell into a trading internship at Jane Street. Now she helps lead the research group’s efforts in machine learning. In this episode, In Young and Ron touch on the porous boundaries between trading, research, and software engineering, which require different sensibilities but are often blended in a single person. They discuss the tension between flexible research tools and robust production systems; the challenges of ML in a low-data, high-noise environment subject to frequent regime changes; and the shift from simple linear models to deep…
Podcast
Signals and Threads
Jane Street · Tech & Science · English
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers who are working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more…
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E27 · 1 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
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Nate Foster is a professor at EPFL in Switzerland in the Networked Systems Abstractions Lab, and a visiting researcher at Jane Street on the Networking team. In this episode, he and Ron consider what happens when you bring a software mindset to network engineering. Can you use programming language theory and formal methods to realize the dream of software-defined networks? Along the way, they discuss how hyperscalers have shaped networking hardware; the return (or not) of multicast; the ways ML workloads are reshaping the networking layer; and the success Jane Street has had using an early…
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E26 · 17 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 48 min
Why Testing is Hard and How to Fix it with Will Wilson
Will Wilson is the founder and CEO of Antithesis, which is trying to change how people test software. The idea is that you run your application inside a special hypervisor environment that intelligently (and deterministically) explores the program’s state space, allowing you to pinpoint and replay the events leading to crashes, bugs, and violations of invariants. In this episode, he and Ron take a broad view of testing, considering not just “the unreasonable effectiveness of example-based tests” but also property-based testing, fuzzing, chaos testing, type systems, and formal methods. How do…
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E25 · 3 Sep 2025 · 1 hr 13 min
Why ML Needs a New Programming Language with Chris Lattner
Chris Lattner is the creator of LLVM and led the development of the Swift language at Apple. With Mojo, he’s taking another big swing: How do you make the process of getting the full power out of modern GPUs productive and fun? In this episode, Ron and Chris discuss how to design a language that’s easy to use while still providing the level of control required to write state of the art kernels. A key idea is to ask programmers to fully reckon with the details of the hardware, but making that work manageable and shareable via a form of type-safe metaprogramming. The aim is to support both…
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E24 · 25 Jul 2025 · 59 min
The Thermodynamics of Trading with Daniel Pontecorvo
Daniel Pontecorvo runs the “physical engineering” team at Jane Street. This group blends architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and construction management to build functional physical spaces. In this episode, Ron and Dan go deep on the challenge of heat exchange in a datacenter, especially in the face of increasingly dense power demands—and the analogous problem of keeping traders cool at their desks. Along the way they discuss the way ML is changing the physical constraints of computing; the benefits of having physical engineering expertise in-house; the importance…
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E23 · 28 May 2025 · 1 hr 20 min
Building Tools for Traders with Ian Henry
Ian Henry started his career at Warby Parker and Trello, building consumer apps for millions of users. Now he writes high-performance tools for a small set of experts on Jane Street’s options desk. In this episode, Ron and Ian explore what it’s like writing code at a company that has been “on its own parallel universe software adventure for the last twenty years.” Along the way, they go on a tour of Ian’s whimsical and sophisticated side projects—like Bauble, a playground for rendering trippy 3D shapes using signed distance functions—that have gone on to inform his work: writing typesafe…
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E21 · 14 Oct 2024 · 1 hr 6 min
The Uncertain Art of Accelerating ML Models with Sylvain Gugger
Sylvain Gugger is a former math teacher who fell into machine learning via a MOOC and became an expert in the low-level performance details of neural networks. He’s now on the ML infrastructure team at Jane Street, where he helps traders speed up their models. In this episode, Sylvain and Ron go deep on learning rate schedules; the subtle performance bugs PyTorch lets you write; how to keep a hungry GPU well-fed; and lots more, including the foremost importance of reproducibility in training runs. They also discuss some of the unique challenges of doing ML in the world of trading, like the…
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E20 · 7 Oct 2024 · 54 min
Solving Puzzles in Production with Liora Friedberg
Liora Friedberg is a Production Engineer at Jane Street with a background in economics and computer science. In this episode, Liora and Ron discuss how production engineering blends high-stakes puzzle solving with thoughtful software engineering, as the people doing support build tools to make that support less necessary. They also discuss how Jane Street uses both tabletop simulation and hands-on exercises to train Production Engineers; what skills effective Production Engineers have in common; and how to create a culture where people aren’t blamed for making costly mistakes.
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E19 · 12 Jul 2024 · 1 hr 4 min
From the Lab to the Trading Floor with Erin Murphy
Erin Murphy is Jane Street’s first UX designer, and before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory building user interfaces for space missions. She’s also an illustrator with her own quarterly journal. In this episode, Erin and Ron discuss the challenge of doing user-centered design in an organization where experts are used to building tools for themselves. How do you bring a command-line interface to the web without making it worse for power users? They also discuss how beauty in design is more about utility than aesthetics; what Jane Street looks for in UX candidates; and how…
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E18 · 28 Nov 2023 · 56 min
Performance Engineering on Hard Mode with Andrew Hunter
Andrew Hunter makes code really, really fast. Before joining Jane Street, he worked for seven years at Google on multithreaded architecture, and was a tech lead for tcmalloc, Google’s world-class scalable malloc implementation. In this episode, Andrew and Ron discuss how, paradoxically, it can be easier to optimize systems at hyperscale because of the impact that even miniscule changes can have. Finding performance wins in trading systems—which operate at a smaller scale, but which have bursty, low-latency workloads—is often trickier. Andrew explains how he approaches the problem, including…
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E17 · 15 Aug 2023 · 1 hr 2 min
A Poet's Guide to Product Management with Peter Bogart-Johnson
Peter Bogart-Johnson was one of Jane Street’s first program managers, and helped bring the art of PMing—where that “P” variously stands for “project,” “product,” or some blend of the two—to the company at large. He’s also a poet and the editor of a literary magazine. In this episode, Peter and Ron discuss the challenge of gaining trust as an outsider: how do you teach teams a new way of doing things while preserving what’s already working? The key, Peter says, is you listen; a good PM is an anthropologist. They also discuss how paying down technical debt isn’t something you do instead of…
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