Investment Systems Application Engineer - III

Location: Charlotte, NC, JIS - Oakland

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Core Responsibilities

Test Engineering & Automation Frameworks

• Design and build automated testing frameworks for backend services, data pipelines, and end‑to‑end investment workflows
• Develop regression testing, scenario validation, and deterministic validation suites for portfolio calculations, tax logic, and trading workflows
• Create reusable testing tools, harnesses, and datasets (e.g., golden datasets, synthetic data generation)
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous validation

Controls & Validation (Investment Systems Focus)

• Implement controls‑by‑design to ensure accuracy, consistency, and completeness of investment workflows
• Build validation layers that detect data anomalies, workflow breaks, and calculation discrepancies
• Ensure traceability and reproducibility of results to meet audit and regulatory expectations
• Support development of validation frameworks for portfolio construction, tax‑loss harvesting, and analytics pipelines

Auxiliary Development (Backend / Data / Full‑Stack Support)

• Contribute to backend services or data pipelines to enable testability, observability, and validation hooks
• Develop supporting APIs, utilities, or UI components that aid in testing, debugging, and workflow validation
• Improve system instrumentation to enable better monitoring and validation

Cloud & Engineering Practices (AWS)

• Build and run validation frameworks on AWS using scalable, cloud‑native patterns
• Integrate testing tools into CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows
• Contribute to observability (logging, metrics, tracing) to support validation and issue diagnosis

SDLC & Production Support

• Participate in design, code, and test reviews to ensure quality is built in early
• Support defect identification, triage, and root cause analysis
• Contribute to production validation, reconciliation checks, and post‑release verification
• Ensure solutions comply with information security and technology policies

Experience Required

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, test engineering, or platform engineering within investment, wealth management, or financial systems
• Strong programming skills in Python (preferred) or Java
• Experience building automated testing frameworks (unit, integration, and end‑to‑end)
• Solid understanding of investment domain concepts (portfolios, positions, transactions, tax lots, trading lifecycle, or analytics workflows)
• Experience working with data‑intensive systems and validating data quality and accuracy
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments (AWS preferred)

Preferred

• Experience implementing controls, validation frameworks, or reconciliation processes in financial systems
• Exposure to model validation, analytics validation, or calculation verification workflows
• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and event‑driven architectures
• Familiarity with observability tools and debugging complex production systems

What Success Looks Like

• You build robust automated validation frameworks that significantly reduce production defects
• You improve confidence in investment workflows by ensuring correctness and reproducibility
• You embed testing and control mechanisms directly into system design and delivery pipelines
• You act as a quality multiplier—raising engineering standards across the VPI platform

Special Factors

Sponsorship

Vanguard is offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission—we're on a mission.

To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.