A pedestrian passes in front of 200 West Street, which houses the headquarters of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., in New York.

Goldman Sachs is opening up to outsiders as the 150-year-old investment bank tries to become the Google of finance.

The bank is taking applications for a new one-year program that pays computer engineers $100,000 to tackle "commercially oriented" research topics from machine learning to data visualization and trading strategies, Goldman said Wednesday in a web post. While the company wants top students graduating in August to apply to the program, it's open to anyone.

The idea came from Google billionaire Eric Schmidt during a May conference at the bank, according to Goldman executive Adam Korn.

"He told us that the way to attract some of the smartest people in the world, it's not necessarily people from the obvious schools with the obvious backgrounds," Korn told CNBC. "He encouraged us to just see what a bunch of students could do by playing around with" the bank's software platform, he said.

It's part of Goldman's bid to become something like the operating system for financial services. Under Marty Chavez, co-head of Goldman's trading division, the bank has been taking steps to give clients access to its proprietary risk management systems and data. After developing a web application called Marquee, the bank is now ready to take the next step: opening up its code to outside engineers.