Goldman Sachs is on a hiring spree to become the Google of Wall Street (GS)

• Goldman Sachs is looking to fill over 20 positions for its Marquee platform, which is at the heart of its plan to become the Google of Wall Street.
• The Marquee platform offer clients access to Goldman’s firmwide risk platform and pricing system SecDB.

Goldman Sachs wants to become the Google of Wall Street, and now it is staffing up the unit that could help it achieve that goal.

The New York-based financial services giant is hiring for Marquee, a platform that provides clients access to the bank’s analytics, data, content and execution capabilities via a browser or an API.

The bank is looking for talent to fill positions in its New York office, spanning from associate developer to vice president.

The bank has posted eight job ads for roles relating to Marquee in New York in the past month or so, and has also recently advertised a further 12 roles in Bengalaru and four in Warsaw.

One ad posted in mid-July said the bank is “looking for creative and talented engineers to build out our next generation client facing risk and execution platforms.”

Another ad said the bank is “pursuing engineers across the stack, from those who are confident working with low latency processes through individuals passionate in implementing responsive user interfaces.”

Agility is a core requirement for a spot on the Marquee team. One junior engineer position, for instance, requires someone who can wear many hats.

“At times you will be asked to step into the trading floor environment and at others you will be called upon to guide the decisions of leadership,” the ad said.

Tiffany Galvin, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman, told Business Insider the firm is focused “on attracting top tech talent.”

Marty Chavez, the chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, has been the catalyst for a number of Silicon Valley-like initiatives at the firm, including Marquee.

He served as chief information officer from 2014 until May 2017. He joined Goldman in 1994 as an energy strat after he ended up on a headhunter’s list of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with Stanford PhDs. Recently, he has spearheaded efforts for Goldman Sachs to adopt an approach that is commonplace to business in the Valley.

The new model Chavez is proposing is based on APIs, which are the standard way for computer programs to “talk” to one another without human intervention. When you use your Facebook account to log in to Spotify, that’s Spotify talking to the Facebook login API.

This model is based on taking in data, pushing it through analytics engines, then making it available to internal and external clients through the Goldman Sachs digital platform that Chavez has championed.

“Historically, the API has been human beings talking to other human beings over the telephone, and all the tools, the content, the analytics is on the internal platform only,” Chavez said. “We are shifting this radically and shifting this fast, and we’re packaging everything we do, and actually, we’re redesigning the whole company, around APIs.”

The idea is that giving clients access to Goldman Sachs data and analytics tools strengthens the bank’s relationship with them, leading to additional business.

“Our digital offerings, under the unified Marquee brand, directly correlate to market share and profitability,” one job ad said.

Get the latest Goldman Sachs stock price here.