Google declared a hiring spree for some of its most interesting jobs - and they're open to people with finance experience
If you're a finance professional currently working in a bank and wondering whether you might be better off in a rainbow-coloured world of free food and indoor climbing walls, there is something you should probably know. - Google wants to hire-in a lot more client-facing engineers to work on Google Cloud.
The declaration was made by Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud's new CEO, in an interview with Techcrunch this week. Kurian joined Google Cloud from Oracle in January 2019 and has since been talking to current and potential clients. He said they've told him they like the product, but, "want more people that can help them adopt it and improvements to how they do business with us.” Hence the plan to go on a hiring spree for client-facing staff, who can be strategically-pally with customers.
Kurian didn't reference finance clients specifically, but the financial services sector is emerging as a key battleground for cloud revenues. Jamie Dimon extolled the benefits of the cloud in last week's shareholder letter, saying that JPMorgan had been slow to adopt the new technology but is now "refactoring" most of its applications to take advantage of cloud computing, and that the cloud will be particularly important as the bank "scales-up" its use of artificial intelligence. JPMorgan itself is building a cloud engineering hub in Seattle, and hiring 50 people there this year.
Google doesn't appear to count JPMorgan as a cloud client - or if it does, it's not saying so. Instead, the software company boasts about signing-up the likes of HSBC, Citi, UBS, Scotiabank, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg and Two Sigma, who use it for everything from pricing options to performing quantitative research.
In London, the head of 'customer engineering' in the financial services industry for Google Cloud is Richard Radley, a former consultant at Oracle and one-time software engineer at Reuters. Radley's team has already been expanding: last October he hired Yinka Fasawe, a Goldman Sachs technology analyst, last August he hired Warwick Gardiner, a former HSBC infrastructure architect, and last April hired David Sabater Dinter, a former big data architect at UBS.
Kurian's announcement suggests additional similar hires could be forthcoming on both sides of the Atlantic. As banks fully embrace the cloud, Google could be a good place to be.
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