Goldman Sachs is hiring startup-minded engineers for its new tech incubator

It’s been about a year since Goldman Sachs launched GS Accelerate, an in-house incubator aimed at providing employees with an outlet for pitching potentially innovative ideas that may have otherwise been nothing but a thought. Goldman now appears to be ramping up the full-time engineering teams tasked with taking those ideas and developing them into actual applications.

Just in the last few days, Goldman has begun posting associate, vice president and executive director-level engineering roles based in New York under the GS Accelerate banner. The bank is looking for software engineers with high-level programming experience and knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Goldman has also posted a separate Accelerate software engineering job dedicated to ClearFactr, the financial modeling and spreadsheet software startup it acquired late last year that is now housed within its investment banking division. This particular position focuses on big data.

The engineering roles should be some of the more interesting at Goldman considering the focus on early-stage new product development. Goldman says that engineers will become “core owners” of the projects as they evolve. “Many of these projects are either to deliver proofs-of-concepts or minimum viable products in exciting greenfield environments,” the postings read.

Several banks, including Citi and J.P. Morgan, have built in-house tech incubators to create their own small but well-funded startup factories, though GS Accelerate is a bit different. Employees who think they have the next big idea can apply and, if accepted, present their business plan to divisional and company leaders. If the idea is greenlit, they can take the project on full-time or stay in their current role and chair it from afar. Someone close to the bank said Goldman Sachs considered over 1,000 proposals last year.

Logically, Goldman likely has selected one or more projects to move forward with and is now building up the engineering talent to support them. They have already made at least one new hire, though he’s a familiar face. Pirapong Jitngamplang, who worked within Goldman’s securities division until 2017, returned to join the project in February after getting his MBA from Columbia University, where he earlier earned a bachelor’s in financial engineering.

Goldman declined to comment on their hiring plans or current projects in development under GS Accelerate.

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