Goldman Sachs & JPMorgan MD leaves banking for Stripe

A few years back, banking engineers jumped off the financial services bandwagon en masse for big tech; many went to AWS, even as AWS provided many technologists to banks. Some who left for big tech then returned to big banking, often for a big promotion. One such person was Robert Waugh. And he's just left banking once again for another high-prospect industry, fintech.

Payments giant Stripe has hired Waugh as a staff software engineer, where he cryptically says he will be "engineering the risk." He spent the last two years at JPMorgan in Seattle, focused on integrating cloud tools and infrastructure.

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Waugh has been an engineer since he was a high school senior in 1994, taking a number of jobs before first reaching financial services with Goldman Sachs in 2006, when he was a VP and head of Americas core strats. After eight years at Goldman, he left for AWS, becoming general manager of its real-time analytics platform CloudWatch Logs. Five years later he returned to Goldman a managing director in cloud engineering. He left for JPM 3.5 years after that and now he's gone again.

This isn't technically Waugh's first foray into fintech. After leaving high school, he joined the founding team of Gloss.com, an eCommerce platform focused on cosmetics that was eventually sold to Estée Lauder. He kept his passion for fashion while he was in financial services, becoming the "first male to not wear a tie in his Managing Director promotion class photo."

JPMorgan's Seattle team is pretty well paid: one executive director working for the bank in Seattle told LevelsFyi he was paid $734k in January this year. Stripe has a reputation for paying pretty well too, though. 

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