The most exciting new jobs at Goldman Sachs are not open to finance candidates

If you haven’t got the message already, Goldman Sachs is a technology firm. Lloyd Blankfein says so. If that’s not sufficient, around 27% of its staff are technologists and a technologist, Marty Chavez, will soon be its CFO.

If media reports are correct, nothing is closer to the heart of Chavez than Marquee, the product that allows clients to interface with Goldman’s risk systems (minus the mediation of all those expensive Goldman salespeople).

It should be of interest, therefore, that Goldman’s hiring for Marquee in NYC. Last week, the firm posted an advertisement on its careers page saying it’s looking for developers to work on Marquee’s equities offering. The candidates, who’ll be helping to “externalize” Goldman’s “core analytics and data”, need to know a lot about technology, but nothing really about finance.

Goldman isn’t necessarily looking for computer science graduates (or even graduates of any kind) to fill Marquee development roles: it’s just looking for people with a passion “for solving large scale engineering problems” and knowledge of the requisite open source technologies, including React, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and D3. Preferably, they’ll also be “passionate” about responsive user-interfaces, or “confident” in using low latency processes.

Marquee is a technology product, so you could say it’s hardly surprising that Goldman wants to hire technologists to work on it. However, if Marquee goes to plan it’s likely to render many of Goldman’s existing sales staff surplus to requirement (particularly when combined with AI product Kensho). And those sales people, who’ve spent years honing their knowledge of finance, could struggle to find new roles in a world where their function has been automated by a new generation of exceptional technologists with no knowledge of, or interest in, stock picking whatsoever.

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com