Quantitative Investing Associate

About the Investing Team:

The Investing Team at Betterment is responsible for strategic asset allocation of our core portfolios, including support of algorithmic fund selection and risk advice. The team is composed of quantitative finance experts who use mathematical and statistical tools to prototype, test and analyze models which include, but are not limited to, financial planning models, tax overlay trading strategies, and due diligence on alternative investment strategies. Additionally, the team is also responsible for the education of our customers, which we do through writing white papers, blog posts and speaking engagements at conferences.

About the right team member: 

You’re an algorithmic investing nerd. You’re all about optimization, and you sweat the details. You’re analytical and curious by nature. You seek the truth through detailed analysis of data. You solve problems by writing excellent code. You are creative and trust your intuition, but demonstrate it through empirical evidence.

At Betterment you will get to: 

• Design and analyze portfolio management strategies, including rebalancing, asset location, trading methods, and dynamic adjustments
• Develop and maintain strategic asset allocation for model portfolios through thoughtful testing with monte-carlo simulations and use of historical scenario stress-testing.  
• Support investment selection and analysis
• Perform market simulations to calibrate and validate investing algorithms and parameters
• Work across the organization - Trading, Product, Engineering - to bring investing products to life
• Collect, clean and check data
• Have an opinion, and back it up with evidence
• Research, design and implement statistical models to analyze raw data from databases
• Proactively collaborate cross functionally with internal teams to source and test new ideas

You will be effective if you have: 

• 2-4 years of financial industry experience, ideally at a bank or large asset management firm
• A background in Math, Stats, Econ, Finance, CS, EE, or related field
• A deep passion for making investing better, combined with an eye for detailed testing
• Strong knowledge of R, Python, or another serious statistical computing language
• Experience writing production-quality, scalable, efficient code for reliable testing and analysis  
• Desire to tackle difficult problems with elegant solutions
• Strong technical and analytical skills and familiarity with financial datasets across different asset classes
• Clear and effective communication skills (both verbal and written), especially for presenting complex quantitative research to experts and non-experts

Bonus points if you have: 

• A professional background in automated trading
• Expertise with index and portfolio construction

About Betterment

Betterment is the largest independent online financial advisor with more than $11 billion in assets under management. The service is designed to help increase customers’ long-term returns and lower taxes for retirement planning, building wealth, and other financial goals. Betterment takes advanced investment strategies and uses technology to deliver them to more than 300,000 customers across its three business lines: direct-to-consumer, Betterment for Advisors, and Betterment for Business.