From Big Tech to Wall Street, Here’s What Brought Me Back to Banking

As Wall Street has poured money into technology budgets and become major players in patents and research, it’s also become a destination for technologists to work — rivaling even Silicon Valley.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Melissa Goldman, a partner and tech leader at Goldman Sachs. She started her career 30 years ago at Goldman Sachs as an analyst and worked her way to managing director before departing for the rival firm JPMorgan Chase, where she helped lead the corporate tech division as a chief information officer.

Goldman joined Google in 2022 as a vice president and global head of corporate engineering, creating and deploying technologies that power Google’s internal systems. Last fall, Goldman returned to Goldman Sachs, where she runs the engineering teams powering the bank’s investment banking and sales and trading units. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with New York City-based Goldman. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I was a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University back in the early 1990s. The experience of being a computer science student at a very technical university meant you spent most of your time in the basement of the engineering building doing your programming.

I knew that the way I wanted to use my technology skills was really to apply them to real-world problems, where your technology would make a material difference toward a product or a business, where you could actually see the impact of your work in almost a real-time basis.

When I ended up in financial services, I couldn’t have been more pleased. The volumes, speed, and characteristics of what drives the business are tied to actually being able to build and engineer systems and solutions that enable all of that to happen.

One of my responsibilities during my first stint at Goldman Sachs was the collateral management system, which helped manage some of the contractual relationships with our counterparts. I was helping the firm manage risk and relationships with our clients. It was my responsibility to architect and build out a system that was nimble and could manage the complexities of these relationships and calculate money moving between counterparts.

That responsibility became even more pronounced during times of volatility, and I was able to see firsthand how my work was pivotal in important times for the firm.

Some projects involved enabling a new financial product that we could offer to our clients or operating our businesses in additional countries around the world. Often, the work provides new and innovative ways to leverage our data to create greater insights and transparency into various decision-making processes.

But I left finance for Google out of curiosity.

As an engineer, I was interested in having the opportunity to work in tech and be involved in the building of products. I had built a lot of expertise through my work in finance that was very applicable to the tech industry, but at the same time, I thought I could learn something new through the lens of a technology company.

The work I was focused on impacted the entire employee base of Google. We built and implemented the systems used by Googlers around the world, making sure people had what was needed to get their jobs done and the company had the systems in place to run it. So, my work had a direct impact on the employees of Google and an indirect impact on the customers of Google.

But I missed this sense of purpose toward very tangible business results —the volatility, the constant need to be nimble, responsive, and reactive.

Arguably, I couldn’t put that same kind of art and finesse to work at Google in the way that I have the opportunity to within financial services.

The reality is — and I remind folks of this when they try to make the comparison — that tech and finance have a different set of products and a different environment. Financial services is an industry where tech is a differentiator to the success of the business; at a company like Google, tech is the business.

How to handle the rate of change

I’m thrilled to be here. But it’s hard.

The pace and rate of change are exceptional. How technology is evolving, the opportunities to bring AI and automation and different kinds of efficiency elements to what we do and how we do it (every couple of weeks there’s something new and different), how we challenge ourselves to be at the forefront of these things — it’s exhausting, right?

It’s an amazing time to be an engineer, but it’s a lot of responsibility to do it well and stay nimble enough to respond and react to the changes that are out there.

There is no question AI will be a material part of our journey for the next decades, and for someone like me, it will involve being on the front lines of maximizing the technology to help our people better serve our clients.

Already, we are seeing a roughly 20% increase in efficiency depending on the developer and the use case. One of the most impactful ways we can use it is to take the toil out of the tasks that we would rather not have our best and brightest minds working on and instead have them work on designing new products. We’re going to ask some individuals on our teams to do different things, but it’s more about evolving their role than a flat-out completely different way of operating.

I believe engineers will maintain their creative role in designing systems and architectures. As technology evolves, they will still act as the conductor in an orchestra of additional instruments.

I think we’re only scratching the surface of what opportunities we’ll be able to realize through it.

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