Goldman Plans Hiring Spree in Trading (Only Coders Need Apply)
Goldman Sachs trading division is planning its biggest hiring spree in years. The catch? The entire effort is focused on coders.
(Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s trading division is planning its biggest hiring spree in years. The catch? The entire effort is focused on coders, a sign of where Wall Street is headed.
The firm is looking to add more than 100 engineers for tech-related roles on the trading floor in the coming months, according to Adam Korn, co-head of engineering in the trading division. Goldman plans to raid its rivals in the tech and finance industries, with most of the new positions to be based in New York and London.
“You are going to see us very actively in the marketplace going after this kind of talent,” Korn said. “Historically, engineers were not seen as a part of the business. That’s obviously changed.”
The firm is focused on adding people who can respond to the demands of trading partners seeking to automate, Korn said.
Wall Street has been in a state of upheaval for the past decade, especially involving traders who sit in between buyers and sellers of stocks and bonds. Rapid advancements in technology have fundamentally altered the way that business gets done, enabling firms to cut staff as automation takes over. Banks are responding by allocating more resources to technology.
The firm’s new management under Chief Executive Officer David Solomon approved the plan earlier this year.
“We walked in there with our ‘Shark Tank’-esque plan,” Korn said. “The leadership group was excited and interested and the firm is putting money where its mouth is.”
Marquee Hires
The hires at Goldman will help continue the build-out of Marquee, a trading and risk-management platform that the firm hopes will translate into a meaningful business line in its trading division.
Goldman has also been overhauling its electronic-trading platform to serve large quant hedge funds, with an eye toward using advancements in trading tools that could then be deployed across a larger set of business partners. Reducing trading time, processing more requests and spitting out faster responses to queries would help generate more trades and more business.
Raj Mahajan, a partner at the firm, has been a key part of the initiative, helping build out the technology backing the equity-trading operations. He was recently elevated to a new role that will make him responsible for all quant client needs.
The effort has been making some inroads, with the firm last quarter scooping up more than $2 billion in quarterly revenue from equities trading and narrowing the gap with Morgan Stanley, which has held the mantle of Wall Street’s top equities-trading shop in recent years.
That didn’t go unnoticed.
“We’ve done over $2 billion a quarter, the first and second quarters, for a while now,” Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Pruzan said after the firm released second-quarter results. “A competitor did this for the first time in a long time.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Sridhar Natarajan in New York at snatarajan15@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steve Dickson, Daniel Taub
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