When Maria Samuel graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in industrial and systems engineering, she was recruited by Apple and Google. She had been coding since the ninth grade and had worked in seven programming languages. As an intern at NASA in Houston, she worked with a team planning Mars missions.

But Ms. Samuel accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs, joining the investment bank in 2015.

A product manager, she works with a team to develop software for market analysis, client communication and trading. She views financial markets as a window into industries, markets and behavior. “Every day, I’m constantly learning,” she said.

After the financial crisis, graduates with computing skills shunned Wall Street for Silicon Valley. But that is no longer the case, as the finance industry is attracting young talent and seasoned technologists. Last year, for example, JPMorgan Chase lured Apoorv Saxena, a senior A.I. product manager at Google, to lead the bank’s A.I. product development, and Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University to head an A.I. research team.

For Ms. Samuel, 25, the job was appealing, but so was the locale. New York is where many of her friends have come to start their careers. And Ms. Samuel, who sang in a choir and an a cappella group in college, describes herself as a “big Broadway geek.”

For most recent graduates, the financial meltdown a decade ago is a distant memory. Today, it is not Wall Street but the big tech companies, like Facebook and Google, that are under fire. Their business models, based on gathering consumer data and targeted ads, have put them at the center of global concerns about privacy and false news.

That is a recruiting opportunity these days for R. Martin Chavez, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, who is also a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Stanford. At recruiting events, his pitch is to say Google and Facebook have done “amazing things” and quickly add: “If you want to work on advertising, that’s where you should go. If you want to use math and software to solve hard problems for governments, corporations and other institutions, you should come to Goldman Sachs.”

As the New York tech sector grows, policymakers and executives hope to broaden its reach beyond Manhattan and the affluent portions of Brooklyn. Fred Wilson, an investor and venture capitalist in New York for more than three decades, saw a warning sign in the protests in Long Island City, Queens, over the news that Amazon had planned to move in.