Senior Quantitative Equity Systems Developer

Location: Malvern, PA

Time Type: Full time

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

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.