Now Goldman Sachs lost one of its algo traders to Google

As we reported earlier this week, Goldman Sachs is trying hard to build its algo trading business but its electronic trading professionals keep leaving. Now another one's gone - this time to Google.

Chandan Nath left Goldman this month to become a software engineer at Google in London according to his LinkedIn profile. Nath had been at GS for over eight years. He started as a 'strat' in the fixed income division and became an executive director in systematic market making and FX algorithmic trading. Although Goldman is now all about systematic trading, Google was clearly more appealing.

Nath's exit comes as Google has over 150 jobs to fill in London as it prepares to move into a £1bn London HQ near Kings Cross which will be able to house up to 7,000 staff. Many of Google's more esoteric jobs in areas like data analysis and cloud computing will be of interest to Goldman's strats and technology professionals, who number over 9,000 globally.

Goldman Sachs itself is currently trying to fill around 17 engineering jobs in London. However, the firm has shifted many of its more interesting roles to Warsaw, where it's currently hiring software engineers to work on its Marquee project to make its SecDB pricing and risk database accessible to clients, along with engineers to work on Bolt web, a new pricing platform for derivatives products. As jobs move out of London, more of Goldman's London engineering and strats team might decide to move to Google.

Nath is the eighth senior exit from Goldman's algorithmic and electronic trading business in the past few months. Many of the other leavers have gone to work on rival banks' electronic trading systems. Google poaching talent too is probably a nightmare Goldman could do without.

Goldman strats and engineers who leave for Google might want to bear in mind that some Google staff have complained about the tech giant's lack of flexibility when it comes to promotions though. - "I'm on the business ladder instead of the engineering ladder and now that I want to swap onto the engineering ladder, I can't. Engineering pays more at the same level, but because I didn't come in a software engineer, I'm kind of stuck here," says one Google employee who wants to move to Goldman Sachs.

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