Quants: "What does it take to get hired by Goldman’s hot ‘strats’ group?"

From eFinancial Careers:

If you’re someone with a mathematical bent, for whom ‘challenging’ maths questions are elementary and differential equations are fun, there is – allegedly – one place where you’ll feel especially fulfilled in banking: Goldman Sachs’ ‘strats’ Group. All banks have mathematical wizards, but the warlocks in Goldman’s strats team are reportedly higher paid, happier, and more empowered than those elsewhere.

“The strats team here is broader in scope than quant teams at other banks,” one strats vice president at Goldman in London tells us, speaking off the record as he is not authorised to talk to the press. “As well as quants, we have quant developers, technologists, structurers and salespeople.” Goldman’s strats team is at the forefront of the firm’s algorithmic and electronic trading business, he adds – making it key to the future of the firm.

Goldman itself describes its strats team as a, ‘a world leader in developing quantitative and technological techniques to solve complex business problems.’ Members of the team are divided into three groups: ‘desk strats’ who sit with traders and develop derivative pricing models and trading algorithms, ‘sales strats’ who support the sales team with quantitative research for client questions, and ‘core strats’ who work on the firm’s technology architecture using Goldman’s own proprietary coding language, ‘Slang.’ As we reported last week, Goldman’s already powerful strats group is said to be gaining influence internally now that the new CIO, Marty Chavez (a former strat himself) manages both strats and technology for the firm. The former CIO, Steve Scopellite, merely had technology in his purview.

One London-based recruiter who hires for Goldman’s strats group says members of the strats team get paid far more than technologists and quants at other firms. “I’ve seen top programmers with excellent understanding of specific derivatives receiving offers of £350k,” he claims.”Goldman strats get ridiculous amounts of money compared to most tech people.”

Goldman was unable to comment within the time frame of this article, but doesn’t typically discuss pay anyway. What does seem certain, however, is that positions in Goldman’s strats team – however sought after – aren’t always easy to fill. Strats jobs are often advertised for months on the firm’s own website. For example, Goldman has been advertising for an associate-level member of its IBD strats team since January 2014 and for a member of its fixed income and commodities strats team since March.

“Goldman is extremely fussy about it hires into the strats group,” says the head of the technology practice at one search firm, speaking anonymously as Goldman is a client. This fussiness is combined with a need to keep feeding the beast.”Goldman has a rolling requirement for recruiting a lot of people into strats,” says another quantitative finance recruiter, speaking equally anonymously. “It’s a huge area of their business – about eight times the size of other banks’ quant groups,” he adds.

Needless to say, members of Goldman’s strats team need to be talented mathematicians. According to Goldman’s own recruiters, they also need to be have, ‘an ability to code and to pick up a new coding language.’ “90% of the desk strats in London have a PhD in maths from places like Imperial, the London School of Economics and Cambridge,” claims one recruiter. Among Goldman’s core strats, a first class degree in computer science from a top university is said to be more common – along with expertise in everything from C++ to C#, Cocoa (Touch), Objective C and Java.

Interviews, interviews and interviews
As with all roles at Goldman Sachs, getting a job in the strats team involves multiple interviews. Anecdotally, however, strats roles involve even more interviews than most....MORE 

HT: QuantNet Forum