Engineering - Cloud Architecture and Engineering - Systems Engineer - Vice President - Seattle at Goldman Sachs

What We Do

At Goldman Sachs, our Engineers don’t just make things – we make things possible. Change the world by connecting people and capital with ideas. Solve the most challenging and pressing engineering problems for our clients. Join our engineering teams that build massively scalable software and systems, architect low latency infrastructure solutions, proactively guard against cyber threats, and leverage machine learning alongside financial engineering to continuously turn data into action. Create new businesses, transform finance, and explore a world of opportunity at the speed of markets. Goldman Sachs Engineers are innovators and problem-solvers, building solutions in Artificial Intelligence, risk management, big data, mobile and more.

Foundational Infrastructure

As part of Foundation Engineering at Goldman Sachs, the Foundational Infrastructure Cloud Architecture and Engineering team is responsible for designing new cloud patterns and solutions to transform our key infrastructure platforms to be cloud native enabling the use of public cloud services across the firm. You will be working as part of multi-disciplinary team responsible for researching, architecting and building a cutting-edge platform that enable Goldman Sachs teams to deploy and manage services in public cloud safely and securely. We are at an early stage of modernizing our platforms around cloud native principles, and you will be directly contributing to cloud patterns that programmatically enforce safety, security and compliance of services and enables engineers to innovate faster. You will also assist early adopters in their use of these new solutions to ensure their efficacy and efficiency and get feedback that will drive further automation and enhancements.

The organization is seeking highly collaborative, creative, and intellectually curious engineers who are passionate about developing and implementing cutting-edge cloud computing solutions. The ideal candidate will thrive in a DevOps culture and contribute to customer-centric product development. They will work closely with cross-functional teams, and will be creative collaborators who evolve, adapt to change and thrive in a fast-paced global environment.

Responsibilities And Qualifications:

As part of our global Cloud Architecture and Engineering team you will be a senior hands-on infrastructure engineer responsible for researching, designing, testing and developing foundational AWS compute and networking platforms used across Goldman Sachs. This role is deeply rooted in systems engineering: Linux operating systems, AWS infrastructure primitives, distributed systems behavior, and production reliability. You will define and implement standardized infrastructure patterns used to migrate and operate critical workloads from on‑premises environments into AWS. You will work closely with other infrastructure engineers, SREs, and application teams, acting as a technical authority for cloud-based Linux platforms, while maintaining ownership of systems throughout their full lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, evolve, and own reference architectures and standardized infrastructure patterns for running Linux-based workloads on AWS, with a focus on EC2‑ and ECS‑based platforms.
• Architect and implement scalable, highly available, secure, and cost‑effective cloud infrastructure used to run critical production workloads across the firm.
• Serve as a design authority for cloud infrastructure solutions, providing architectural guidance and participating in formal design and technical reviews to ensure alignment with firmwide architecture standards, risk posture, and cloud strategy.
• Lead the design of repeatable, automation-first patterns for migrating and operating workloads from on‑premises environments to AWS, including hybrid connectivity and stateful Linux workloads.
• Build and evolve infrastructure solutions that integrate on‑premises systems and public cloud services in a consistent, secure, and operationally sound manner.
• Partner closely with application teams, SREs, and platform engineers to understand workload characteristics and translate them into resilient infrastructure designs, balancing performance, reliability, cost, and operational complexity.
• Apply systems-level thinking to identify and mitigate risks related to performance, capacity, availability, and failure domains in large-scale distributed environments.
• Contribute deep Linux systems expertise to architectural decisions, including OS behavior, capacity modeling, operational characteristics, and production troubleshooting.
• Promote and enable automation-driven operations to reduce manual effort, configuration drift, and operational risk across cloud platforms.
• Provide senior technical leadership through mentorship, design guidance, and hands-on support during complex design efforts, incident analysis, and cross-team problem solving.
• Collaborate effectively with globally distributed teams across multiple initiatives in a fast-paced engineering environment.

Basic Qualifications:

• 6+ years of experience in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles, with hands-on production experience building and operating AWS-based platforms.
• Deep expertise in Linux systems architecture, including production operations, performance analysis, and troubleshooting in distributed environments.
• Strong experience designing and operating highly available, scalable infrastructure systems, with a solid understanding of networking, distributed systems concepts, and infrastructure failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to define and drive adoption of standardized infrastructure patterns or reference architectures across multiple engineering teams.
• Proven experience making and communicating complex architectural decisions, including clear written and verbal communication tailored to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading or contributing to large-scale on‑premises to cloud migration programs, including hybrid or phased migration strategies.
• Familiarity with multi-account AWS architectures, landing zones, shared services models, and hybrid connectivity (e.g., Direct Connect, Transit Gateway).
• Prior experience serving as a design reviewer or architectural authority in formal governance or design review forums.
• Experience advising on cloud compute and CPU architecture selection, including tradeoffs among x86, ARM, and specialized instance families.
• Strong understanding of hardware-level considerations (e.g., NUMA topology, memory bandwidth, IO characteristics) and their impact on Linux workload performance.
• Ability to provide architectural guidance to specialized or emerging platforms (e.g., AI/ML workloads) with a focus on performance, scalability, cost efficiency, and operational risk.

About Goldman Sachs

At Goldman Sachs, we commit our people, capital and ideas to help our clients, shareholders and the communities we serve to grow. Founded in 1869, we are a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm. Headquartered in New York, we maintain offices around the world.

We believe who you are makes you better at what you do. We're committed to fostering and advancing diversity and inclusion in our own workplace and beyond by ensuring every individual within our firm has several opportunities to grow professionally and personally, from our training and development opportunities and firmwide networks to benefits, wellness and personal finance offerings and mindfulness programs. Learn more about our culture, benefits, and people at GS.com/careers.

We’re committed to finding reasonable accommodation for candidates with special needs or disabilities during our recruiting process. Learn more: https://www.goldmansachs.com/careers/footer/disability-statement.html