Senior Quantitative Equity Systems Developer

Vanguard Group, Inc.

$120K — $150K *
Finance & Insurance
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Minimum ten years of experience with at least five in development.
  • Undergraduate degree or equivalent; graduate degree preferred.
  • Proven experience in building large-scale software systems in complex environments.
  • Strong grasp of quantitative equity investing principles.
  • Successful track record in investment-aligned tech roles.
  • Expertise in modern software engineering practices and cloud-native platforms.
  • Proficiency in Python and data processing tools.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build cloud-native platforms for equity models.
  • Collaborate with investment teams to create tech solutions.
  • Architect systems for portfolio construction and risk modeling.
  • Integrate external vendor data solutions for performance.
  • Work with enterprise tech teams to adopt architectural standards.
  • Lead design decisions for distributed systems and data pipelines.
  • Drive engineering practices for performance and security.

Benefits

  • Hybrid working model for flexibility and collaboration.
  • Mission-driven environment focused on client well-being and employee development.
  • Opportunity to influence technology strategy in investment.
  • Strong emphasis on mentorship and raising technical standards.
Full Job Description
What You'll Do:
  • Design, build, and operate cloud-native platforms that run quantitative equity models across research, back-testing, and production workflows
  • Partner closely with portfolio managers, quantitative researchers, and traders to translate investment ideas into robust, scalable technology solutions
  • Architect systems that support active equity portfolio construction, risk modeling, factor analytics, and execution workflows
  • Integrate and work with carefully selected external vendor data provider solutions, ensuring reliable, performant, and well-governed use of data.
  • Collaborate with centralized enterprise technology teams to adopt and implement approved architectural patterns, platforms, and shared services
  • Lead technical design decisions across distributed systems, data pipelines, and compute-intensive workloads
  • Drive engineering best practices around resilience, observability, performance, and security in a front-office environment
  • Mentor and influence other engineers, raising the overall technical bar of the team
  • Ability to be a change agent, embrace innovation and shape people, process and technology view to solving complex problems.
  • Contribute to the long-term technology strategy for quantitative and systematic investing platforms


What we're Looking For:

This role is designed for candidates who are equally comfortable in investment conversations and deep technical discussions. You sit with the investment team, not behind layers of abstraction. It offers a rare opportunity to operate at the center of technology-driven active equity investing.

You will help shape the architecture and direction while embracing and fostering a culture that values technical excellence, intellectual curiosity, and close partnership with the business. If you are a senior engineer or technical lead who enjoys working on complex, high-stakes systems, wants to be deeply embedded in the investment process, and brings both engineering rigor and investment domain knowledge, we would love to hear from you!

Requirements:
  • Minimum of ten years related work experience, with at least five years of development experience. Prior Investment Systems experience required.
  • Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience. Graduate degree preferred.
  • Extensive experience building large-scale, production-grade software systems in complex domains.
  • Strong understanding of quantitative or active equity investing, including concepts such as factors, signals, portfolio optimization, risk, and execution.
  • Demonstrated success working in front-office, investment-aligned technology roles.
  • Deep expertise in modern software engineering, including object-oriented and/or functional programming paradigms, distributed systems and data-intensive architectures, and cloud-native platforms such as containerization, orchestration, and managed cloud services.
  • Strong proficiency in Python and modern data processing and numerical computing tools (e.g., Polars).
  • Familiarity with machine learning and AI-assisted development techniques, including the use of AI or agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code) to improve research and engineering productivity.
  • Experience building and supporting AWS architecture including services such as EC2, CloudWatch, ECS, Sage Maker, ECS, Steps Functions, Lambda and Postgres.
  • Experience operating in environments where system performance, reliability, and correctness are business critical.
  • Direct experience supporting quantitative equity, systematic, or multi-factor investment strategies.
  • Familiarity with research and back-testing platforms, market and alternative data, and model lifecycle management.


Preferred Experience:
  • Exposure to both legacy enterprise systems and modern engineering stacks, with the ability to modernize thoughtfully.
  • Prior experience working side-by-side with investment teams on a trading floor or similar front-office setting.
  • Strong knowledge of equity trading and execution systems.

Special Factors

Sponsorship
Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

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