Goldman Sachs needs ‘engineers’. As senior staff at the firm like to reiterate, Goldman is pretty much a technology firm. It operates 1.5bn lines of code, has an infrastructure with 38 petabytes (each petabyte being a thousand terabytes) of storage and makes over 16m software changes every month. It’s no surprise, therefore, that 25% of the firm’s staff work in tech roles or that 37% of the graduates hired by Goldman last year came from STEM backgrounds.
If you’re joining Goldman’s tech division, which teams are best? Which projects should you be aiming for? And, more importantly, where are they based? As the chart below makes clear, only a small proportion of Goldman’s tech vacancies today are in London and New York City. The bulk are in Bengalaru, India, while Goldman’s moving European technology roles out of London to Warsaw, where it recently occupied an office at the top of the city’s prestigious ‘Spire’.
Based on publicly available information and conversations with Goldman Sachs technologists, we’ve assembled a list of some of the most interesting contemporary tech teams/projects at Goldman Sachs below. Let us know if we’ve left anything out using the comments box at the bottom of this page.
1. The team that’s rebuilding the FX and commodities trading platform
Goldman is rebuilding its FX and commodities trading platform, from scratch. The existing platform is built in .NET and the new platform is being built as a web-based platform in HTML 5, Javascript and CSS. The firm currently has vacancies for this team in New York.
2. The FAST analytics team
Goldman’s FAST team is a hybrid between data analytics and tech. Standing for Franchise Analytics, Strategy & Technology (FAST), it sits within the Strats Group and is about developing analytics into tools that can be used by Goldman’s fixed income currency and commodities (FICC) traders and salespeople to deliver insights make better decisions. Goldman describes FAST as a “quickly growing” team. Jobs can currently be found in New York or Bengalaru – with the Indian office having some of the more interesting roles relating to Bayesian inference and natural language processing.
3. Marquee Studio
We’ve written a lot about Marquee, but if you haven’t come across it before it’s the project that will allow Goldman’s clients to directly access SecDB, its risk management system. Marquee jobs are often based in London or New York and Goldman is currently looking for a Marquee developer to work on its NY equity technologies team. One of the best teams within Marquee seems to be “Studio”, which is developing a tool that enables clients to build and analyse a cross-asset custom investment strategy using baskets and indices. This is the team that employs 23 year-old Zach Hamed, who was nominated on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. Studio is run by Andrew Philips, a former Goldman developer turned equities sales strat who’s based in NY.
4. The systematic market making unit (SMM)
Ok, so these are more like trading jobs than tech jobs, but the trading jobs still need tech skills and there are tech jobs that support the tech-traders.
Goldman launched its systematic market making unit in February last year. SMM brought together Goldman’s existing electronic market making and algorithmic trading teams with the intention of increasing Goldman’s presence in both areas and of increasing the amount of automation in Goldman’s FICC trading business. SMM employs strats who can code trading algorithms in London and New York and engineers who can support the system in Warsaw and Bengalaru. Team members tend to be computer science or mathematics graduates with an interest in trading.
5. TSecDB
There’s SecDB (Securities Database) and then there’s TSecDB. The latter is an unpublicised SecDB modification which creates a dataflow system that feeds Goldman’s high frequency algorithmic trading platform. Little more is known about it than that, but Goldman insiders suggest it’s one of the firm’s recent key initiatives. There are no advertised roles for TSecDB, but the team appears to be based in New York.
6. The client platforms team
As Goldman makes more of its products directly accessible to clients, it’s building a team of user experience (UX) professionals who can design engaging interfaces used by its clients. These aren’t programming roles. although programming helps and you’ll need some awareness of data visualisation tools. Goldman’s currently hiring client platforms people in New York.
7. The banking technology team
Goldman Sachs is trying to automate-away some of the least interesting tasks done by the analysts and associates in its investment banking division. In January, Marty Chavez, the soon-to-be CFO said the automation of investment banking tasks like IPOs is the next thing on the firm’s list of projects to get on with. From this point of view, the ‘banking technology team’ which creates technologies to support deal generation and execution sounds important. These roles are likely to be based in Bengalaru, though.
8. The consumer finance team
Lastly, it’s not a fancy project supporting algorithmic trading or a new analytics platform, but it Goldman’s building a consumer finance technology team to support Marcus, its new online banking platform offering fixed rate no-fee personal loans. These may not be the “best” tech jobs (plenty of them seem to be low level testing roles) within Goldman but if you want to join a growing team at Goldman Sachs in Dallas, this is the one for you.
Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Related articles:
“This is why I left J.P. Morgan’s tech team”Sometimes finance and extracurricular interests are incompatible.
The $bn struggle to replicate Goldman Sachs’ special powersThere's a piece of Goldman Sachs that every other bank wants. Billions have been spent in its pursuit. Few have much to show for it.
The hidden weakness inside Goldman Sachs?What if Goldman Sachs' secret sauce were also its future weakness?
““