How To Get A Technology Job In Banking & Financial Services

• Bank technology jobs can be prestigious if you work in the right team. Roles aren’t classed as revenue-generating, though, meaning you’re susceptible to cost cuts.
• Technology jobs are increasingly being offshored to destinations with cheaper labor costs, with only the very best remaining in western HQs.
• Bank technology jobs pay decently, and have decent work-life balance, but hybrid roles and contract jobs are becoming more difficult to obtain.
• Programming languages like Java, Python and SQL are needed for the majority of jobs,  but comparatively niche languages like C++ are where the real money is.

What do financial technologists do, and which firms need them?

It’s hard to say exactly what bank technologists do. The term “technologist” is rather generic, covering dozens if not hundreds of roles in finance – everything from writing code for trading systems, to infrastructure, to cybersecurity, to the cutting edge of research, including quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here

For the most part, what technologists do is support the rest of their company. Banks are huge employers of technology talent and they spend accordingly. JPMorgan, for example, said in its 2025 Investor Day presentation that it expects to spend $18bn on technology this year. It expects to spend $3.7bn on technology specifically for its corporate and investment bank (CIB). $5.3bn is spent on products and platforms, while a further $2.7bn goes on modernizing technology, maintaining existing technology and technology to protect the firm and its customers. Banks have cumbersome “legacy” code systems to support their operations and are trying to automate where possible and migrate all they can to the cloud.

Banks have historically been quite bad at allowing technologists to remain at the coal face, coding, and have tried to promote them into management roles. However, this has changed (somewhat) with the introduction of “distinguished engineers” or “tech fellows”, which are titles to recognise banks’ best developers individual contributions. Many of these are also managers.

There are technology jobs all across the financial spectrum, but also plenty of places where they have a lesser impact. Private equity and private credit, for example, aren’t really renowned for their tech talent.

You’re more likely to see technologists take a starring role in a hedge fund or high-frequency trading (HFT) firm. Algorithmic trading firms like Hudson River Trading or Quadrature place their developers front and centre and pay them accordingly. Hedge funds also pay well, but are notoriously hard places to work as an engineer.

You may also want to look for engineering jobs at financial technology ‘Fintech’ startups. Top engineers at firms like Stripe can earn a lot of money and have the added bonus of earning stock-compensation in a growing company. 

What sort of technology jobs are there in banks?

There are a number of roles available in a bank’s technology team.

Front office technology jobs

A lot of people want to work in this space when they first start out. Front office  technology is sexy. It’s closest to the bank’s sources of revenue – and in fact, the “front office” is usually defined by the roles in the bank that are in themselves revenue-generating. Think commodities, equity derivatives, rates, portfolio managers in asset management, or maybe even a banking team.

As a front office technologist, you’ll be developing tools like trade and position blotters or creating pricing engines in partnership with quantitative research (see our section on quant careers) and market data teams.

Sounds great, right? Well, the bad news is that front office technology teams often run very lean. They can have arduous support rotas and a lack of investment in adopting strategic frameworks and renewing tech stacks. The most important work is given to trusted individuals, and work tends to be very atomized. Front office technology can be both stressful and boring.

Core technology jobs

Core technology teams are where the long-term strategic work is done. This is about long-term planning rather than day-to-day functioning. A core team might embark on a technical strategy for a user interface and develop a framework that starts to be used by business-aligned teams. If you’re someone who mostly wants to interact with other developers and be able to keep up with industry trends, then core teams are the way to go.

Middle- and back-office technology jobs

If you work in the middle or back office, you’ll find a whole host of teams doing different types of work. There are compliance and regulatory technology teams who often have to work to externally mandated deadlines. You also have market risk, payments and settlements, valuation control, and capital management.

If you work on middle- or back-office technology requirements, your clients will be teams in operations, in financial control, in compliance, or in any other non-revenue generating team. Things tend to be a bit more relaxed than front office, and you’ll be more likely to use industry standard tools and languages. Some of the roles in compliance (RegTech) can be interesting and involve the use of natural language processing (NLP) Artificial Intelligence (AI), or Quantum Computing.

Infrastructure technology jobs

Infrastructure technologists work on the technological framework that underpins the bank. This includes cybersecurity and cloud computing. If you work in infrastructure technology, your clients are other developers. There will typically be highly skilled specialists hired in this area – with ‘fellows’ or ‘distinguished engineers’ more common than elsewhere in banks’ technology teams.

Business analyst jobs

Business analysts are the people who intermediate between the business and developers. This is a role that’s going out of fashion – banks want ‘T-Shaped’ developers. What they mean by this is that they want to cut costs and have developers talk to the business directly – pretending that complexity and interaction over multiple silos doesn’t exist. There are fewer people working in business analysis now than before: graduate tracks for business analysis no longer exist at some banks.

Project management jobs

Project managers can be some of the most infuriating people for the average developer to deal with – they put meetings into developers’ calendars to talk about project timelines, why things are late, and delivery milestones. Project managers are often used to arbitrate between different teams for complex projects. To a large degree they are little more than secretaries, but the senior ones are paid like technical architects. If you’re a developer, this can be particularly infuriating.

Data science jobs

Data science jobs arguably need an entire section of their own in this guide because, as data proliferates, banks and funds are building armies of data specialists. Hedge funds especially are increasingly trying to get an edge by looking at “alt data” sources, like information on footfall in shopping malls, or sentiment on social media.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of data-related roles in finance: data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. Data analysts interface with the business to find out what the data needs to do, and develop visualizations to show that information. Data engineers take raw data and prepare it for analysis – cleaning it, moving it, tagging it, and so on. And data scientists create the models that are able to extrapolate from the data in a way that is presentable to the business.

Data science specialists in finance may be a shrinking field, however. Instead, banks are looking for multi-disciplinary data scientists; engineers are thought to be more attractive to banks if they also have data science fundamentals, while investment banking analysts are starting to learn them too to stand out for graduate roles. 

Data roles have nonetheless become more important in the age of AI and machine learning. Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on accessible data in the cloud, and banks have been constructing “data lakes’ for this reason.

How are bank technology jobs changing?

There are two major changes happening to the engineering culture of banks: the integration of AI, and the return-to-office (RTO) push. 

Banks are all looking to integrate cutting-edge generative/agentic AI tools.  Some are built by the bank like Morgan Stanley’s DevGen.AI, a tool designed to update legacy code written in outdated languages into more modern ones. Others are licensed: Goldman Sachs is integrating Cognition’s AI coding agent Devin, with chief information officer Marco Argenti likening it to a “new employee.”

The good news is that AI is getting rid of all the laborious jobs that engineers don’t like to do. DevGen.AI is thought to save 280,000 hours of work at Morgan Stanley, allowing engineers to focus on more exciting tasks.

The bad news is that AI may also be helping banks cut headcount. Citi, which eliminated 100,000 hours of work with its own AI code-review tool, said it had increased severance payment costs last quarter due to the “realignment of [its] technology workforce.” 

Engineers elsewhere are being pressured to leave rather than being cut. JPMorgan is one of multiple banks pushing staff to come back to the office five days per week; front-office people have been doing this for some time already, and headhunters have suggested that the main aim of such a policy is to encourage resignations in areas like tech in order to replace them with lower-cost staff in locations like Poland. 

Banks also appear to be targeting work-from-home advocates during layoffs. Goldman Sachs assessed time spent in the office for its yearly reduction in force (RiF), at which time insiders noted that the majority of staff still working in a hybrid capacity were technologists.

There are exceptions. Banks like Citi and Standard Chartered allow technologists to work from home multiple days per week. At the former, even chief information officer Jonathan Lofthouse works hybrid. 

As banks try squeezing costs lower in technology, they’re increasingly situating staff in low cost locations. Dallas and Texas more broadly are popular in the US. In Europe, Citi, JPMorgan and UBS each have more than 3,000 employees in Poland. India is also a beneficiary of outsourcing. In June, Standard Chartered cut 80 people in Singapore to offshore the roles to India. Banks are also ‘nearshoring’ technologists; Goldman Sachs is currently building a tech hub in Birmingham, the UK’s second city.

What is the engineering culture like in banking?

In sectors like Big Tech, you can easily carve out a career as a senior engineer without having to assume managerial responsibilities. The same is not true in banking; The further away you are from the code, the more money you make. You’ll have a hard time progressing beyond VP level without becoming a manager; after all, managing director is in the name. In some cases, tech MDs in banking write barely any code at all, and find it difficult to move jobs because of it.

Technology is also distinctly middle-of-the-road in finance when it comes to working hours. In our 2025 salary and bonus report, tech staff told us they worked an average of 52.9 hours per week last year. They were in the minority of divisions that saw an increase in working hours, having reported working 52.2 hours in 2023.

Some developers have told us they work as little as 10-hour weeks, but that’s unlikely. However, due to the highly regulated nature of banking, you’ll often be bogged down by bureaucracy and need to wait for approval even when making tiny changes to code. 

What qualifications do I need for a bank technology job?

You might imagine, with the variety of jobs available in a bank’s technology team, that the qualifications you need to get a job there vary rather wildly. You’d be wrong. When we analysed Goldman’s tech analysts (juniors), there was one degree that outnumber all others: computer science. 

There were some exceptions, but mostly for software engineering graduates – computer science was the clear king of that particular hill. A lot of the junior class held master’s degrees, too. Master’s degrees in financial technology, such as those offered by Imperial College London and the University of Hong Kong, could be particularly valuable here. 

Master’s in Financial Engineering (MFEs), despite usually being associated with quantitative roles, are also a strong option, especially in data roles. Our ranking of financial engineering courses put Princeton University on top, followed closely by Baruch and Carnegie Mellon. École Polytechnique topped the European rankings. 

In the age of AI, however, that might not be enough to make the big leagues. Some bank roles, such as the most cutting-edge machine learning roles, can require a PhD. A PhD can help for other roles too; banks like to brag to shareholders about the number of PhDs they have, whether or not they know what those PhDs are actually doing. These will mostly put you in the “labs” that banks have set up to develop their AI capabilities. 

Beyond university, the best qualifier for a banking job is arguably your prominence in the open-source sector. By contributing to high-profile open-source projects, especially ones that banks are also involved in, you show ambition while allowing hiring managers to see how your code fits into a broader piece of infrastructure. 

Additional qualifications for technology are harder to pin down, but depend on what you want to specialize in. You can receive accreditations in areas like AI or cloud infrastructure from software providers like cloud infrastructure firm Snowflake; they’re certainly not compulsory, and you might even earn them as part of an internship, but they can at least be good for showcasing areas of interest.

Coding languages you’ll need to know for a financial technology job

When we analysed the most popular coding languages in financial services – based on analysis of job listings and their requirements – the most popular languages were, by quite some margin, SQL, python, and Java. 

SQL: Although SQL might not seem like the obvious choice for the financial services industry’s favorite coding language, it makes perfect sense with a bit of thought. It can deal with huge amounts of data. It integrates beautifully with Excel. It allows for complex queries, data analysis, and reporting. It might not be as useful in some front office capacities (and therefore likely not as well paid) as Python and Java, but it’s a silent workhorse.

Python: Man Group, the biggest hedge fund in the UK (and Europe), once said that its first language was English – and that its second language was Python. The language’s influence in finance can’t be understated, and with good reason: it’s incredibly intuitive, easy to use, and has a huge ecosystem of libraries that can be tapped into. It’s also the go-to language for machine learning, which has only increased its prominence.

Java: Java was once in the position Python is now in; banks went crazy for Java developers in the early 2000s, and large amounts of legacy infrastructure is built in the language. There are a few exciting Java roles out there, many of which are focused on low-latency systems.

Python and Java aren’t the only languages, however. There’s a host of them: Rust, R, C#, Q, KdB, and so on. Generally, these are niche languages, with specific uses. Some big banks even have their own internal programming languages, most famously Goldman Sachs’, called “Slang”, which is an internal proprietary coding language similar to Python, and underpins much of Goldman’s front-office technology. It was built to work with SecDB, Goldman’s risk and pricing engine, and it’s very good and that – even if Goldman is moving away from it, and towards Python and Java.

We’d be remiss not to mention C++, the low-level programming language known for commanding some of the highest pay packages in financial technology. Top C++ engineers at hedge funds and trading firms can earn $600k, but you’ll need to be exceptional.

Salaries & bonuses in bank technology jobs

Technology roles in banks don’t pay as well as front-office roles such as those in M&A or sales & trading, but they pay very handsomely regardless, as figures below from our 2025 salary and bonus survey show.

As with many other support roles, such as those in risk or compliance, the majority of a technologist’s compensation is in their salary. A technologist can expect a bonus of around 25 to 50% of their annual salary on average for the majority of their career, until they reach Managing Director (MD) level.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Signal also available.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)