The jet reconstruction algorithm is developed under the condition of high particle density in the calorimetric system. The performance of reconstruction of hard QCD jets with initial parton energies 50-300 GeV is studied in central Pb--Pb collisions with a modified cone jet finder which includes an algorithm for event-by-event background subtraction. The heavy ion background is simulated using the HIJING Monte-Carlo generator with dNch/dy = 5000. Results on the achieved jet reconstruction efficiency, purity, energy and spatial resolution are presented