How to get a technology job in banking and financial services

• Banks need technologists to build infrastructure for everything from trading execution to cybersecurity. They also build tools to make their non-technical staff more productive, including new generative AI products.
• 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 and Python are needed for the majority of jobs, but languages like Scala and C++ are where the real money is.

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

It’s hard to say exactly what a financial technologist is. The term “technologist” covers dozens if not hundreds of roles in finance - everything from writing code for trading systems, to cybersecurity, to the cutting edge of research, including quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

In almost all cases, technologists play supporting roles, either building new systems to make the rest of their company more efficient or maintaining the systems already in place. There are cumbersome “legacy” code systems in banks built in languages like COBOL or Slang, a language Goldman invented in the 90s, which require constant attention to keep them operable with the newer tech banks are developing. With AI tools becoming widespread, these maintenance roles are much less safe than they used to be. 

Banks are huge employers of technology talent and they spend accordingly. JPMorgan, for example, spent $18bn on technology in 2025 and it expects to up those numbers to $20bn this year. JPMorgan's technology division has ~65,000 employees and Nearly 20% of its ~7300 job openings are in engineering, architecture and data. At Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, ~12,000 of its 45,000+ staff work in technology.

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 elite technologists build trading systems in a hedge fund or develop trading algorithms in a high-frequency trading (HFT) firm. The lines between quant researchers who traditionally create mathematical models and quant developers who engineer the systems that trade those models are blurring; roles once reserved for elite mathematicians can now be done by computer science professionals with access to Claude or other large language models.

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? 

Front office technology jobs

Front office technology is sexy. It’s closest to the bank’s sources of revenue and you’ll often find yourself working close to or directly with revenue-generators. 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 (which manage relationships with data vendors). In many banks there are two types of technologist doing this; quant strats work directly with traders to build quick usable prototypes, then software engineers are tasked with building out more robust versions of those prototypes.

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.

Applied research and technology jobs

These are the frontier technologists of banking. In an applied technology team, you’ll be working on the kind of tech that CEOs like to wax lyrical about on conference calls. This is primarily AI, of course, but can include the likes of virtual/augmented reality, quantum computing and blockchain infrastructure. These roles are for the more academically inclined, and can often lead to you getting your name on some academic publications. Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti said at a conference this month that Goldman's C-Suite spends "a disproportionate amount of time" with engineers working on transformational AI projects, meaning you also get some high-level exposure that can make you very valuable.

There are some problems with applied research. Working on trendy technologies is all well and good while they’re trending but if they fall out of fashion you could be surplus to requirements. JPMorgan was hot on VR when the Metaverse was first announced but it recently shuttered its efforts in the space.

There’s also the unfortunate reality that banks are infrequently on the frontier of frontier technology. Quantum research and AI are usually much more exciting in Silicon Valley which isn’t burdened by the same regulatory web that banks have.

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 are an almost entirely different beast 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. In a trading context, a lot of this work is already done by quant researchers and developers.

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.

What is your career path as a banking technologist?

Most tech firms like to tier their engineers from junior to principal. In the AI space it's becoming common to obfuscate seniority by calling everyone members of technical staff. In banking, your career path mirrors the progression of bankers themselves.

You'll join a bank as a technology analyst and within a few years work your way up to associate. If you're good enough, you become a VP; you might already have direct reports by this stage but VP tends to be the highest you can go as an individual contributor. 

When managing a team as a VP, your role is similar to a tech lead, managing one or two projects for the head of technology within your function. If you make it to MD, you'll be managing multiple teams and be responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of technologists.

Many banks offer an adjacent promotion path; you can become a “distinguished engineer" or "tech fellow", which are titles to recognise banks' best hands-on technologists. This title will often lead to you working ad-hoc on some of the most important technical issues at your respective bank, or being treated as a subject matter expert. Many of these tech fellows are also managers.

You can read our full guide to career paths for banking technologists here.

What is the engineering culture like in banking? 

In our 2026 salary and bonus report, tech staff told us they worked an average of 43.8 hours per week last year. That’s pretty chill for a finance job, but they might not be happy about it, given they were working closer to 39 hours per week the year before.

Some developers have told us they work as little as 10-hour weeks; 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. This was great when remote working was still available, but might drive you mad at a bank demanding five days in the office. 

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. Tech MDs in banking used to write barely any code at all, and found it difficult to move jobs because of it. Now that everyone’s delegating coding tasks to their AI agent, this might not be so much of an issue.

As for coding methodologies, the industry was obsessed with agile at the start of the decade but today that fever seems to have subsided. Scot Baldry, CTO of JPMorgan, said in 2024 that waterfall delivery is better when working on clearly defined tasks, while agile is better for missions with unclear end goals.

What qualifications and skills do I need for a bank technology job? 

As with almost any technology job, you need either computer science or STEM fundamentals. Given that banks hire most of their technologists through their graduate schemes, that means you’ll likely need to get an undergraduate degree in a STEM subject.

There are smaller quicker wins you can also get. Depending on the role you’re applying for, consider obtaining a cloud/ai accreditation, or contributing to open source projects.

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

If you want a technology job in a bank, your best bet is to learn Java or Python. The former was exceedingly common in banks for decades and is embedded in a lot of the tech stacks seen across the industry. Python is newer and shinier and also used pretty much everywhere else. It’s also used pretty much everyone else so the competition for Python jobs will be rife.

If you’re open to learning something new, Scala is a language with a huge imbalance of supply and demand; it’s mentioned in over 17% of jobs but used by less than 3% of candidates. For high paying roles, consider C++ instead.

You can see our full breakdown of the most prominent coding languages in finance here.

How is AI changing careers in financial technology?

There are two primary effects that AI is having on technology roles. One of those is convergence; as AI automates the more mechanical or process-driven tasks in banks, jobs that were focused solely on those tasks might disappear and those duties will be given to another engineer. Alternatively, that process-driven technologist might be given additional duties beyond their previous scope, enabled by AI.

The second way AI is affecting tech jobs is a massive increase in expectations. JPMorgan tracks AI usage among staff and expects them to make more, higher-quality code using AI tools. Goldman Sachs doesn’t track AI usage as closely, but does expect an increase in “velocity” of projects completed.

How much are employees using these AI tools? Goldman staff use roughly two million prompts per month while Citi (which has a larger headcount) had ~14m AI interactions. This equates to just a few prompts, per employee, per day, but engineering staff are presumably using it disproportionately. Banks usually say that, for engineers, the technology is providing productivity returns of 10-20%.

You can read our full guide to how AI is affecting technology jobs here.

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 2026 salary and bonus survey show. At MD level, technology professionals earn over $700k on average. 

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.

Read our full breakdown of compensation for technologists in banking here.

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