Jane studied at Jesus College, Oxford where she gained an MA in mathematics in 1982. After that, she became part of a small team building a microcomputer to which they ported CCP/M. It was the start of a long-lasting love of systems programming.

Jane joined Symbian (then known as Psion) in 1995 to lead the team whose goal was to create a new 32-bit operating system, now known as EKA1. This goal was realized two years later, when the Psion Series 5 was released. Since then, Jane has taken on a variety of roles within Symbian, including product management, systems architecture and setting up a small product-focused research group in Japan.

In 2003, Jane moved to the South of France and began work on Symbian OS Internals, which was published in 2005. She is now an independent consultant working for Symbian from her new home in Kiev, Ukraine.