William Steinberg

Executive Director at Morgan Stanley

William Steinberg has always been drawn to environments that challenge the mind and reward curiosity. Born into a Marine Corps family, with a father who served as a Marine Corps pilot for nearly thirty-five years, he experienced frequent relocations from an early age. Those constant changes exposed him to new cultures, perspectives, and routines, teaching adaptability long before it became a professional necessity. As a result, he developed a natural interest in understanding how systems work and how structure and discipline can coexist with creativity.

Early Passions Beyond the Classroom

From childhood, William balanced technical curiosity with creative and physical pursuits. Music and sports played an essential role in his early life, providing both discipline and release. He learned to play the guitar and spent countless hours practicing, while also competing on his high school basketball team. These interests helped shape his ability to focus, collaborate, and perform under pressure, qualities that later became essential throughout his engineering and leadership career.

Academic Path and Engineering Foundations

William pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Old Dominion University, where he built a strong foundation in core engineering principles. During his studies, he completed a six-month internship at NASA’s Langley Research Center, contributing to the HALOE project, which was used on space shuttle missions to collect solar data. This experience exposed him to high-reliability systems and rigorous scientific standards. He later earned a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from California State University, Northridge, where his academic excellence led to induction into the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.

Developing Practical Technical Expertise

By the time William Steinberg completed his formal education, he had already accumulated hands-on experience across multiple technical domains. His work included digital hardware design, embedded systems, and signal processing, all of which required careful attention to detail and strong analytical thinking. These skills prepared him to work confidently with complex systems and laid the groundwork for a career spanning multiple industries while maintaining a consistent focus on engineering depth.

Aerospace and Defense Engineering Work

William began his professional career at McDonnell Douglas in California, contributing to the development of new programs for the MD-80, MD-11, and C-17 aircraft. His responsibilities included developing embedded firmware, operating system software, and tools for airborne data acquisition systems. These projects demanded precise coding, extensive unit testing, and low-level hardware debugging. He later joined Sonatech in Santa Barbara, where he designed data-acquisition controllers and embedded software for underwater acoustic tracking systems used in both military and commercial applications.

Transition into Financial Technology

In January 1994, William relocated to New York City to join Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Technology Division. This move marked a significant transition from aerospace to finance and the beginning of a long and influential career in financial technology. During his early years, he worked on C++ infrastructure, mortgage-backed securities trading systems, equity cash trading tools, and real-time data dissemination platforms. Many of his utilities were deployed globally and became integral to daily trading operations.

Growth into Engineering Leadership

As William advanced at Morgan Stanley, his responsibilities expanded to include leadership of larger engineering teams. He managed groups responsible for application management infrastructure that supported critical systems across the firm. His work influenced platforms used for monitoring, scheduling, outage handling, and distributed process management. These roles strengthened his ability to align technical execution with operational reliability, while mentoring engineers and building resilient organizations.

Long Tenure at Goldman Sachs

In 2008, William joined Goldman Sachs, where he spent over 14 years contributing to the firm’s most complex trading systems. Serving as Vice President, William Steinberg supported Equities Electronic Market Making and Equities Quantitative Trading groups. He worked on market-making systems, quantitative tools, futures trading platforms, and desk-level risk management solutions. His responsibilities also included ETF trading support, real-time NAV calculations, CAT reporting, and integrations with exchanges and dark pools.

Returning to Morgan Stanley

William returned to Morgan Stanley in 2023 as an Executive Director within Institutional Securities Technology. In this role, he leads a global C++ development team responsible for implementing trading risk controls. His work helps safeguard the integrity of platforms that power the firm’s trading operations, drawing on decades of experience in electronic trading, system reliability, and risk management.

Professional Skills and Enduring Interests

Over his career, William has developed deep expertise in C++, Python, Perl, Lisp, and Bash, as well as extensive familiarity with operating systems, networking, and hardware platforms. Outside of work, he remains active in charitable causes, including Habitat for Humanity and science mentorship programs. He continues to enjoy music, basketball, water sports, travel, and discovering new pursuits that keep his curiosity engaged.