An ex-Goldman Sachs MD behind the bank's secret sauce joined a $100bn data firm with crazy pay
Goldman Sachs' securities database (SecDB) was lauded in the 2000s as technology ahead of its time. While it's faced a few criticisms in recent years, not least for its proprietary language Slang, the technologists that have worked on the platform in the past seem to be doing well for themselves. Kirat Singh, one of the earliest SecDB leaders, started his own company, which sold for $560m earlier this year. Antony Courtney, an MD that worked on SecDB for the bulk of the 2000s, has been out of finance for a while but just joined a data firm with a reputation for ridiculous pay.
Courtney has joined Databricks in San Francisco as a staff software engineer "developing the data science agent and its UI on the Editor/Assistant team." Courtney spent eight and a half years at Goldman; he joined as a PhD graduate in 2004 and made MD just six years later.
After leaving Goldman Sachs in 2013, Courtney spent four years on a "self funded sabbatical" working in the open source space. He eventually resurfaced at Facebook as an engineering manager, then went on to have a stint at cloud infrastructure firm Snowflake. He also was a founding engineer at MotherDuck, an analytics infrastructure firm that achieved a $400m valuation back in 2023.
Databricks is in vogue right now, having raised a total of $11bn so far this year and achieving a $100bn valuation. According to levels.fyi, it has paid its staff engineers an average of $611.9k since the start of 2024, Senior staff engineers earned an average of $1.63m in that same time frame.
For many engineers, Databricks stock makes up the bulk of compensation packages. Given the firm's $100m valuation, there are complaints that now is perhaps too late to join the firm to make the most of its stock pay, but not all agree. Speaking on Blind, a Databricks employee said "people said it's too late at $38bn, said too late at $60bn and are now saying too late at $100bn." Another said "I don’t think we’ve even hit our prime yet."
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