James Tan

James Tan is a software engineer at Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm and designated market-maker, where he has worked full-time since 2024 following a 2023 internship. He read Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (BA, 2021-2024) after attending Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet. He represented the United Kingdom at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2020 and 2021, earning a bronze medal in both years, and was the first QE pupil to reach the British Informatics Olympiad final (2020). Before university he worked on Twitter's tweet-analytics tooling as a 2022 intern and held early roles at Softwire and First Class Learning.

Notes3

• Quant employment verification: CONFIRMED. James Tan has held a paid Software Engineer Internship at Jane Street (2023) and a full-time Software Engineer role at Jane Street from 2024 - both stated on his LinkedIn profile, which also matches the IOI identity (University of Cambridge, London Area). Jane Street is a proprietary quantitative trading firm and designated market-maker on NYSE and Nasdaq; a software engineering role there is a quant-finance technical role even though the title is not 'quant'. The IoI/Olympiad identity and the LinkedIn identity are consistent (Cambridge mathematics degree, UK). Status: employment CONFIRMED via the LinkedIn-index/aggregator record; no independent primary-source (Jane Street-published) confirmation of the individual was found, so the employer record should be treated as index/aggregator-sourced.2024
• Full-time Software Engineer at Jane Street since 2024, after a 2023 Software Engineer internship there and a 2022 Software Engineer internship at Twitter. The Jane Street title is 'Software Engineer' (not 'Quantitative Trader/Researcher'), so the quant exposure is via the firm's proprietary trading business rather than a named quant-analyst role.2024
• Won two IOI bronze medals representing the United Kingdom in consecutive years (2020 and 2021), per the official IOI statistics site - the profile lists score/rank per year.2021
• First QE boy ever to reach the final of the British Informatics Olympiad (BIO 2020), while in Year 12 at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet; the final was moved online from Trinity College, Cambridge, due to Covid-19.Apr 17, 2020
• Studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (BA, 2021-2024), leaving into the Jane Street role - a maths degree feeding directly into a trading-firm engineering seat is the common quant pipeline, though no causal claim is made here.2024
• Coding interest predates the Olympiad: he built websites in his spare time before learning Python, and was the programmer for QE's HYBRID VEX EDR robotics team while also teaching coding to primary pupils via the Year 12 volunteering programme.Apr 17, 2020
• Pre-university work history: a 2020 work-experience stint at Softwire (built a multiplayer Yahtzee game with an Express.js/REST backend) and a 2019-2020 Academic Tutor role at First Class Learning; these are entry-level/junior roles, not quant finance.2020