Goldman Sachs Data Lakes team Developer
I have an offer from Goldman Sachs Data Lake team for Data Architecture role. Tech stack for team : Java, Workflow, Spark, MapReduce, Flink, Elasticsearch, Sybase IQ My work (Most Probable) : Apache Spark, Kafka, Elastic Search, and Akka Role : Tech Associate Experience : 3 YOE (Masters degree in Computer Science) Location : Jersey City, NJ 1. Could you please help me with the team culture and overall Goldman Tech culture ? How much room is there to expand your designing, code writing and business interaction skills ? 2. Evaluate offer : Had a very initial phone call with HCM. I was told base : 140k, some relocation bonus, some current unvested RSUs match, significant bonus (not saying the number). Yet to finalize the offer. How much bonus should I expect, provided I perform above average in the team ? Should it be less than 20k, 20k-40k, 40k-60k or even more than that ? Should I expect TC above 200k next year (2020), provided Goldman performs decent and I perform above average ?
is this for marcus?
No. Data lake is the team. Are you aware of that ?
Data lake team handles the hadoop data store of the firm. Not very sure of the TC but if you're looking for work that'll impact a lot of users investment banks arent the place for you. You'll have a very good work life balance but the scale and use base for your products will be minimal. Except for the consumer teams all other tech teams in GS make products for internal use so the user base won't be more than 200. Data lake may have more as all the tech teams use it to keep their data.
Lake is infrastructure and not a revenue generation division so I wouldn’t expect your salary to rise much yearly. The significant bonus line is prob on the lower end. It will absolutely not be close to tech pay.
It really depends on the firm more than you. Tech isn't as important to the banks (re: cost center) as IB/trading so obviously those guys are the ones they want to keep happy in a bad year. In a good year, they will get tremendous bonuses, tech will get decent (probs between 20-60k) for associate. My experience at Goldman was meh, I would leave for any tech company/hedge fund for more TC. Not worth it imo, I suggest you negotiate, accept offer, and look for other ones soon after (don't stay there long). When I was there, tech had 130 MDs out of 13k + people, and most were direct md hires from other firms. No reward for loyalty anywhere :p
Could you please describe, in terms of what : technology, team, manager, compensation, you had bad experience ? As per I am told currently, I am fine with the projects and tech stack. I am more concerned about the culture and compensation. - Base : 160k is possible with negotiation ? - How much relocation generally does Goldman offer ? - Is there any way, I can make them write on offer letter about minimum Annual Bonus amount ? - What is the ratio of good year and bad year at Goldman ? 10:1 ? 5:1 ? 1:1 ? 1: 5 ? How does it look for say about next 3 years ?
Banking is cyclical at this point(the good ol days before 2008 are loooooong gone) and I would say it's probably 1:1 for good/bad year or maybe 1:2 or 2:1. Keep in mind, good year means absolute knock out of the park (atleast from tech department standpoint. Good year for ib/trading means reasonable year with decent revenue lol). I've worked in front office tech on trading floor(equities) and back office tech in Jersey City. I still have many friends at GS(in finance engineering, Marcus, ops tech, and data lake), and many complain about politics (only one analyst can promo on my team this year), comp (12k full year bonus for associate friend, 1% base raises for many of my friends, etc.). Every year hr hosts an event about compensation in tech and it's literally the most depressing thing. Everyone just yells and complains about how they're getting paid less than SWEs in other companies. In terms of tech stack, as long as you're not in legacy tech team (they use like Java 6? Forget about lambdas and streams), it should be okay. Definitely not the same experience as a tech firm, where SWEs are king and main revenue producers. For example, they refer to the non revenue producing divisions (ops, legal, tech) officially as 'the federation'. And they talk about how the federation has to save them money, not cost more. To answer your questions: 1) yes negotiate as much as possible. Try for a sign on (let them know you have stock vesting or bonus or something that you're missing out on). 2) I was new grad so I think it was 10k could've been 15k. Either way ask for more lol, moving is expensive. 3) no. Work on guaranteed sign on instead. Bonus is a crapshoot. You could also verbally commit to a minimum bonus, and they should pay out (only for first year, years after won't have minimum bonus or anything). If they dont, leave.