Updated 17:17 BST September 3 to clarify Keswani's role is for "The Core" at Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs has hired respected former Nomura Global CTO Dinesh Keswani as Partner and CTO of its "The Core" department. 

Keswani leaves after three years at Japan’s Nomura, where he led a major transformation programme across technology engineering and operations – spanning everything from data center to desktop modernisation.

Goldman describes The Core loosely as comprising "the firm’s functional areas that enable business activity by providing the framework, oversight, and foundational processes allowing Goldman Sachs to scale and operate effectively.  

“The Core Engineering” meanwhile at Goldman is home to 2,000+ engineers who deliver analytics, data, engineering, and quantitative capabilities to six of the bank’s core units, including enterprise platforms and shared services. 

(The investment bank currently has 31 open roles in its core engineering unit, including 13 at VP level – including a cloud technology audit VP; a site reliability engineering VP; and a software engineering VP.)

Keswani will be co-head of the unit alongside Gopi Parameswaran.

Goldman Sachs said in a short press release: “In this role, he will work with teams across The Core to drive sustained innovation, apply consistent practices, governance, and processes, and achieve scaled engineering solutions for the entire organization…”

Goldman’s win is Nomura’s loss – it also recently saw Group CIO Patrick Eltridge move on from the firm after a similar three-year stint. 

Speaking to The Stack in 2024 whilst at Nomura, Keswani emphasised a highly pragmatic approach to engineering with a focus on ownership and systems/software standardisation around open-source and open-standards.

He told us at the time: “I don't need to pay licensing for many, many things. We're gravitating towards a more ‘no-license based’ model, where we have more control over our destiny,” he told us at the time, suggesting that software licensing had become “more expensive than compute.”