Goldman Sachs made a big hire for a newly created role, and it hints at the future of the Wall Street giant (GS)

Goldman Sachs is continuing to fill its ranks with top tech talent to cement its position as a leading technological force on Wall Street.

On Tuesday the financial services powerhouse said Jeff Wecker, a former senior manager at Bridgewater Associates, the Connecticut-based hedge fund, will join the firm in the new role of chief data officer, according to a memo seen by Business Insider.

“In this newly created role, Jeffrey will be responsible for Data Governance and Architecture firmwide, with a particular focus on our data and information strategy, controls, policy, commercialization and business intelligence,” the memo said.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

Wecker will report to John Madsen and Ezra Nahum, according to the memo.

In April, Business Insider first reported Wecker was leaving Bridgewater after being with the firm for more than six years. He left as head of front office transformation. Wecker spent 11 years at Goldman from 1984 to 1995, according to his LinkedIn page.

Wecker is the second big tech hire by Goldman this month.

On October 3, Business Insider reported that Mike Blum, the former chief technology officer at KCG Holdings, the high-frequency trading firm recently acquired by Virtu Financial, was hired by Goldman as chief technology officer for its electronic trading unit. Bloomberg News first reported the hire.

Business Insider has reported extensively on Goldman Sachs’ plans to become the Google of Wall Street. Speaking at the Harvard Institute for Applied Computational Science in January, Marty Chavez, who has since been named CFO, said, “Goldman is for risk what Google is for search.”

With that in mind, Goldman Sachs has built what it calls Data Lake, pulling in information on transactions, markets, and investment research, as well as insights from emails, voice calls, and instant messages. The bank is putting all that data in the same place and applying machine learning. The idea is to guide employees on who to call and when.

“What really makes us valuable is the immense amount of data that we have,” Chavez said. “In this job of inspiring our clients to call us because they have risks they don’t want or want risks they don’t have, there is incredible information content, and using that for the benefit of the clients to get a better result is what we’re up to.”