Alumnus Francesco Chirulli’s Career Journey at Goldman Sachs

Francesco Chirulli graduated from JCU in 2020, with a major in Economics and Finance. In 2021, he moved to the US and lived in San Diego and Salt Lake City before settling in New York City. Francesco has recently been appointed Vice President of Global Banking and Markets at Goldman Sachs.

Tell us a bit about your background.
I’m from Monterotondo, a small town close to Rome. It was a great place to grow up. I come from a close-knit family that runs a drilling equipment manufacturing company. From an early age I was immersed in that world. I spent a lot of time at the factory growing up, and I got to know the products, the clients, the running of an industrial business. It gave me a very practical foundation and shaped how I think about business in general.

What prompted you to study Economics and Finance at JCU?
Growing up in the family business, I realized pretty early that knowing how to make a great product isn’t enough. You need to understand the financial side: how to evaluate opportunities, manage risk, and grow strategically. I wanted to build that toolkit. JCU made sense because I could get an American-style education without leaving Rome, and I liked the international mix and the small classes. I also did an exchange semester at the University of San Diego, which opened many doors and is ultimately what led me to go back to the US for my master’s.

What have you been up to since graduating in 2020?
I graduated right during COVID, which made everything harder but also forced me to figure things out quickly. I stayed involved with the family business on the marketing and commercial side, working with national and international clients, attending trade shows, and helping to grow the brand in new markets.

I went back to San Diego and earned a Master of Science in Finance at USD’s Knauss School of Business in 2022, where I was also inducted as an Executive Graduate Honor Recipient of Beta Alpha Psi.

After that I joined Goldman Sachs in the Global Banking & Markets division. I’ve moved across a few different teams within GBM and I’m currently on the risk and product management side. I was recently promoted to Vice President, and I’m also pursuing my MBA at the California Institute of Advanced Management. So it’s been a full few years.

Congratulations on your promotion! What does this role entail? Any challenges you wish to take on as VP?
I’m in Global Banking & Markets on the risk and product management side. Without getting into too much detail, it’s about making sure the right frameworks and controls are in place, so the business runs the way it’s supposed to. At Goldman Sachs, I’ve learned how a large organization thinks about risk, governance, and scalability  In terms of what the VP title entails, for me it’s about taking on broader, more strategic initiatives with more ownership. It is less about executing individual tasks and more about shaping the direction of things. It’s also about growing as a leader: developing people, driving decisions, and learning how to create impact beyond just your own work. Somewhere down the line I’d also love to find ways to combine what I’ve learned from the industrial world I grew up in and my current role.

How has your academic background helped you progress in your career, and how has it influenced your work style?
JCU taught me how to think across boundaries. My world now is split between American finance and Italian industry, and being able to move between those two worlds (culturally, analytically, linguistically) started at JCU. The foundation I built there and deepened at USD gave me the tools for what I do now at Goldman Sachs. But honestly the soft skills mattered just as much: how to make a clear argument, how to work with people who think differently than you, how to push back respectfully – those are things I learned at JCU.

What courses and/or professors hadhave hade greatest impact on you and why?
The courses that stuck with me were the ones where you couldn’t just memorize and repeat but you had to think through a problem and defend your answer. Finance and Econometrics gave me tools I still use constantly. Micro and Macroeconomics shaped how I think about markets and incentives. And Game Theory was one I didn’t expect to love but it completely changed how I approach negotiations and strategic decisions. Beyond the coursework, I valued that JCU was small enough that professors actually knew you. That level of accountability built habits I still rely on. Several of my professors have made a bigger impact than they probably realize.

What are your plans for the future?
The big goal is to bring my family business to the United States. There’s a huge amount of infrastructure investment happening in the US and there’s a real opportunity to bring to the American market what my family has built for almost 40 years. I want to take that expertise and make it available domestically, possibly starting with distribution and eventually moving into manufacturing.

Beyond that, I just want to keep building at the intersection of finance and industry. What I’ve learned at Goldman Sachs and what I grew up with at home aren’t separate worlds to me but they feed into each other. I’ll always be grateful to JCU for getting this all started. I hope my story shows JCU students that your degree can take you to some unexpected places.