Goldman Sachs taps new India co-heads as Samtani plans retirement

Goldman Sachs has started a leadership reset at its India tech and operations center, naming Ken Castelino and Balaji Sivasubramanian as co-heads as Gunjan Samtani plans to retire at the end of 2026 after 16 years with the bank. The move is more than a handoff at the top. It shows how deeply Goldman now relies on India for engineering, markets support, and global operations.

The firm’s India footprint has grown into one of its most important workplaces. Goldman said its Bengaluru office, launched in 2004, and its Hyderabad office, launched in 2021, are its second-largest presence globally. The company also said it set up an onshore business presence in India in 2006 after a ten-year joint venture, a shift that marked the beginning of a much broader operating model in the country. Earlier reporting has put the Bengaluru campus at about 8,000 workers and described it as Goldman’s largest venue outside New York, while other coverage has said the India GCC has more than 8,000 employees and is among the firm’s deepest fintech hubs.

That scale matters for the employees who build, run, and support Goldman’s businesses from India. Roles once viewed as back-office support now sit much closer to the firm’s core franchises, from public markets and electronic trading to enterprise partnerships and platform engineering. For analysts, associates, and technologists, the center’s expansion has widened the career ladder, with India increasingly tied to work that influences product delivery, staffing across time zones, and the speed at which global teams execute.

Castelino currently serves as Goldman’s head of global banking and markets public in India and co-head of global equities electronic trading strats and engineering. Sivasubramanian is head of engineering in India and global head of enterprise partnerships engineering within platform solutions. Their existing portfolios suggest Goldman wants continuity rather than a reset in direction, preserving the connection between software, quantitative engineering, and operations leadership that has helped India become central to the firm’s day-to-day execution.

Both executives will work with Samtani over the coming months to ensure a smooth transition. For Goldman employees, the succession points to a longer-term bet: India is no longer just a delivery hub, but a strategic base for talent, technology, and operating capacity that will shape how the bank staffs and runs its global business for years to come.