Federation Technology – Technical Architect – VP recruitment

PARA Technology develops and maintains the PARA system, which is one of the key systems in the firm, responsible for calculating the firm’s “official” profit-and-loss as well as sourcing and analysing risk data from SecDB to verify the prices and valuations before reporting it to a wide variety of business users, senior management, and regulators. The PARA system processes all the firm’s trading activity across the vast majority of product lines in the bank – everything from simple equities and bonds to complex structured derivatives, commodity products, loan products and more.

The main business users of the PARA system are Product controllers who are experts in each of the firm’s product lines and the ways in which they are traded. However many other groups also use the system or take data feeds.

The PARA team consists of 15 people in London in a team of around 60 globally, and many projects are cross-location, working closely with business users and technical architects.

The main technology for project development is Java, and we use Sybase databases. We have developed many core pieces of technology in-house, such as persistence and object-relational mapping frameworks, as well as using industry-standard tools such as Ant, Junit and Fitnesse. Our legacy C batch has been almost completely replaced by a real-time STP architecture using sophisticated intraday calculation engines and persistence frameworks.

PARA Technology sits within the Controllers’ Technology department, whose role in general is to ensure accurate, transparent and controlled reporting to internal clients and external regulatory bodies. Controllers’ Technology is part of the Firmwide Technology business unit.
     

RESPONSIBILITIES

The EMEA PARA Architect is responsible for the technical direction and technical quality of the projects undertaken by the London-based team, in both Java and Slang, and works as part of the global PARA technical community to ensure consistency and advocate good practices.

We are looking for someone who is technically skilled and focussed, who can introduce new technical ideas and practices in a collaborative teamwork environment, but who will also be happy to learn a complicated and challenging business domain which covers a broad range of financial products. They will also be part of a wider global team of Technical Architects who help direct the strategic direction of the different teams within Controllers Technology.

The scope of job includes providing technical leadership and direction, setting architectural direction for systems and components, and driving delivery of multiple projects or services.

DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS (This is an opportunity to sell your role!)

• The role is an integral part of our global technical community and provides opportunities to both initiate and participate in global technical initiatives
• Our applications cover the full gamut of financial products and provide exposure to a range of position flows within the firm.
• There are significant engineering challenges associated with one of the largest batch environments in the firm and its gradual transition to real-time reporting
• Controllers Technology has a strong emphasis on quality metrics and feeding this back into our development process and we will be looking for someone to learn and build on this

QUALIFICATIONS

MANDATORY

• At least 10+ years of experience of system design in OO (preferably JAVA)
• Experience of Test Driven Development using Junit, Fitnesse
• Working knowledge of relation databases and SQL (preferably Sybase)
• Interpersonal skills to interact and engage with a wide variety of business clients

PREFERRED

• Experience of designing and implementing financial systems
• Agile development experience in an industry
• Experience training and mentoring staff in writing maintainable code

Goldman Sachs is an equal opportunities employer and is committed to the principle of diversity. Goldman Sachs conducts background checks on individuals offered employment with the firm and employment with Goldman Sachs is conditional upon individuals successfully completing those checks. As part of the background check process, Goldman Sachs may need to obtain a record of disclosable criminal convictions from a government agency such as the Criminal Records Bureau. The firm has adopted policies on the recruitment of ex-offenders and on the retention, storage and disposal of criminal record information which are available on request.