Research Associate, Equities Data Engineer

Job description

**About Bridgewater**  Bridgewater Associates is a premier asset management firm, focused on delivering unique insight and partnership for the most sophisticated global institutional investors.  Our investment process is driven by a tireless pursuit to understand how the world’s markets and economies work — using cutting-edge technology to validate and execute on timeless and universal investment principles.  Founded in 1975, we are a community of independent thinkers who share a commitment to excellence. By fostering a culture of openness, transparency, and inclusion, we strive to unlock the most complex questions in investment strategy, management, and corporate culture.  Explore more information about Bridgewater on our website [here](https://www.bridgewater.com/).  **Our Culture**  Our culture is anchored in excellence, meaning constant improvement, and it is deeply tied to our mission. Because markets are objective, competitive, and getting smarter everyday, we need to keep rapidly improving to have any chance of beating them. Truth is our most essential tool for engaging with the markets and constantly improving because once you know what's true about your problems and opportunities, you can determine how to get better. Valuing truth means being transparent about your decision-making and mistakes, giving and receiving feedback with humility, and fighting for the best answers over hierarchy, ego, or self-interest. Operating this way is hard – it's only possible because we build meaning in our work and relationships. This meaning comes from the audacity of the mission, and the joy of working alongside people who make you a better version of yourself. The culture, like Bridgewater itself, is always evolving. In 1997 our founder Ray Dalio wrote down his lessons, starting with a [Philosophy Statement](https://www.bridgewater.com/culture/bridgewaters-original-philosophy) which remains our foundation. This later evolved into a set of 300+ Principles. In 2022, when Ray transitioned the company, we re-underwrote several of those principles and evolved others, with a specific focus on [Meritocracy.](https://www.bridgewater.com/culture/bridgewaters-idea-meritocracy) Today the culture sits, alongside our people, as our most important edge. When we get it right, it’s the engine that powers everything else. **About the Team** This role sits in our Asia Strategies department, whose goal is to continue our growth down the journey of being the premier investment management firm in Asia. This entails developing great investment strategies reflecting our expertise, generating alpha in the markets, researching and publishing our understanding of the macroeconomic environment, and designing solutions to help our clients invest across the region. **About Your Role** We are seeking a Data Engineer to join our systematic China equity team. In this hands-on, embedded role, you will work side by side with senior researchers in a fast-paced investment environment, building the data infrastructure and pipelines that support cutting-edge systematic research and investment. Unlike centralized data platform roles, this position is deeply integrated with the investment process. You will own the end-to-end data lifecycle that powers alpha research, portfolio construction, and live trading – from sourcing and ingestion to profiling, validation, transformation, and delivery into research and production systems. You will collaborate with our quantitative researchers, developers, and senior investors, and have direct impact on the data and systems that drive investment decisions. You will drive the following responsibilities: - **Identify, evaluate, and onboard new datasets** that can enhance our investment process, assessing their quality, coverage, and long-term value. - **Own the end-to-end lifecycle of key investment datasets**, from ingestion and modeling through ongoing maintenance, documentation, and evolution as research needs change. - **Develop and maintain robust, scalable data models, ontologies, and schemas** that accurately represent investment concepts and enable consistent downstream use. - **Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines** supporting systematic China equity research and production workflows. - **Partner closely with researchers, quantitative developers, and engineering teams** to translate evolving research requirements into reliable, maintainable data assets. - **Profile and interrogate datasets** to understand distributions, coverage gaps, stability over time, structural breaks, and other characteristics that affect research outcomes. - **Implement data quality checks, anomaly detection, and monitoring** to ensure production datasets are accurate, timely, and complete. - **Collaborate with data providers and internal stakeholders** to resolve data quality issues, clarify business definitions, and drive enhancements that improve the usefulness of our data. - **Build and maintain relationships with data vendors**, staying informed on new products and capabilities through conferences, research, and regular engagement. - **Contribute to improvements in tooling, standards, and best practices** that increase research velocity and strengthen the team's data ecosystem. You will be a click for the role if you: - Care deeply about building high-quality, trustworthy data that directly enables better investment decisions. - Enjoy taking end-to-end ownership of data assets—from evaluating new data sources to designing, maintaining, and evolving production datasets. - Are intellectually curious and seek to understand not just the data itself, but the business and investment concepts it represents. - Enjoy solving ambiguous problems where data definitions evolve, requirements change, and thoughtful judgment is required. - Are a strong collaborator who can work effectively with researchers, engineers, product teams, and external data providers to improve data quality and capabilities. - Think in systems, balancing immediate research needs with scalable, maintainable solutions that will stand the test of time. - Are detail-oriented and hold a high bar for data quality, reliability, and correctness. - Are proactive, self-directed, and comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment where priorities can evolve quickly. - Are eager to learn, embrace feedback, and continuously deepen your technical and domain expertise. - Are excited by the opportunity to have a direct impact on a systematic investment process through the quality of the data that powers it. - Are curious about alpha research and excited to build foundational knowledge. Over time, there may be opportunities to expand into alpha development for those who are interested. Interested in learning more about working at Bridgewater? Hear about the experiences of our employees [here](https://www.bridgewater.com/working-at-bridgewater/the-bridgewater-experience). Minimum Qualifications - 1–5 years of experience as a Data Engineer or in a closely related role, either: embedded with systematic investment teams (hedge fund, asset manager, bank), or in a high-scale, data-intensive technology environment (e.g., consumer, payments, or platform companies). - Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience building production-quality, maintainable data pipelines. - **Fluency in Mandarin required**