Q&A with Head of Goldman Sachs Services in India, Gunjan Samtani

Tell us what’s new in Engineering in India.

Earlier this year we opened our new campus in Bengaluru, a $250 million state of the art complex, with many great features for our people including best-in-class health and wellness facilities and a childcare center. Globally, the firm continues to invest in enabling our people to achieve their personal and professional goals. The recently launched family-friendly benefits that aim to help our people better manage the commitment to their careers while starting, growing and supporting a family, is an example of this.

In Engineering, we’re actively growing our team and looking for talent across varied backgrounds and disciplines, both from campus and lateral markets. We want new ways of thinking and diverse perspectives because that is how we will continue to evolve, add value to our clients and create a vibrant community of thinkers, doers and innovators.

Can you talk about the evolution of the firm’s presence in India?

The Bengaluru office was set up in 2004, and today we are an integral part of the firm’s global activities with over 5,000 employees. While operating efficiencies may have been the driver of the office in its early years, over the last decade, the talent of the office has resulted in the focus shifting to building cutting-edge solutions for client-centric initiatives, delivering top-notch engineering and continuous innovation for commercial outcomes, and risk management, as examples.

India has steadily become a strategic location for the firm, and a center of excellence for engineering, contributing meaningfully to the firm’s global priorities.

What type of work is being done and what qualities are you looking for when hiring engineering talent?

Goldman Sachs has an interesting set of businesses and problem statements. Our focus on innovation and our growth strategy provide our engineers opportunities to work on different technologies and business domains. For example, on one end of the spectrum we are solving to calculate $23 billion prices, across 2.8 million positions and 500,000 market scenarios, executing 7.5 quintillion instructions around the clock, and on the other end, we are creating best-in-class interactive products and user experience for our clients and consumers.

We are looking for people who are passionate about solving complex problems. Our culture values teamwork and collaboration, so we look for people who are energized by working in a team setting and thrive on intellectual challenges and diversity of perspectives.  We have roles ranging from developers to data scientists.

Depth of technical content, the ability to demonstrate ownership and to collaborate with global teams, and the desire to continuously learn and drive innovation, are also qualities we value.

There are also several avenues outside of the day to day businesses of the firm by which employees can contribute to and make an impact in the communities that we live and work in. Examples of this are our Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, programs such as the Analyst Impact Fund, and volunteering through Community TeamWorks, to name a few.

The Engineering recruiting team will be at IITs in a few weeks. Tell us more.

Yes, our recruiting team and engineers will be at the IITs on December 1. If you are a student at an IIT, I invite you to come meet us and learn more about the work that we do. Our engineers will answer any questions you have and give examples of the work we do and problem statements we solve.

We welcome everyone to explore opportunities at Goldman Sachs.