I discovered Goldman Sachs through a recruiting event at my university in Warsaw, where I was born and raised. Though my background is in computer science, I found finance to be an interesting way to apply my skills. I ended up getting an internship in credit risk technology at the firm’s London office.
Working for a global firm gave me the option to work in different countries. After my internship, the firm gave me a choice: I could stay on in London, or I could go back to Poland and help grow a new office in Warsaw. A year later, I decided to join the Warsaw office as a full-time analyst. Over the past five years, it’s been exciting to be part of the growth of this office. When I started, there were about twenty people. Now, we sit in the top five floors of the impressive Warsaw Spire Building in downtown.
Technology plays a big role in risk management. As part of the Risk Engineering team, I’m building a unified application to help people across the firm manage risk. The portal I’m working on lets people build their own dashboards to see and compare large datasets from many places. To get there, I work with well established front-end technologies like React,TypeScript and Jest. On the back-end, I use Spring Boot, Docker, and Kubernetes for deployment.
To be successful at what I do, you need strong technical and people skills. We try to hire smart engineers who are also pleasant to work with. You need to enjoy talking to people to understand their pain points and work as a team to solve them. If you’re a computer science student, Goldman Sachs is a great place to take the theories you learn in your classes and put them into practice in the real world.
I’m a leader of the firm’s Women’s Affinity Network in Warsaw. Our goal is to recruit, retain, and develop female talent at Goldman Sachs. We also partner with a local foundation that encourages women across Poland to enter STEM fields. As part of this, we participate in a mentoring program, host the technical and soft skills sessions but also go to small villages around the country and teach children how to code. I also helped on the Women in Tech Summit here in Warsaw, the biggest tech conference for women in Europe. In 2019, it was our second year, and we had a record 6,000 participants.
In my free time, I’m involved in many artistic pursuits. I enjoy going to concerts and music festivals. And I play music myself, as a violinist in a rock band. We’ve done a demo and are planning to record our first album this year. To round things out, I also do jazz dance and take vocal classes.