Wealthfront

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Wealthfront’s mission is simple: we believe that everyone deserves sophisticated financial advice. Over the last five years, we have focused on automating services typically reserved for the ultra-wealthy (e.g. tax-aware asset allocation, tax loss harvesting, secured lending, financial planning), and delivering them directly to consumers at an incredibly low cost. We have been rewarded with rapid growth in our client base, and now manage over $8 billion in assets.

We are looking for talented individuals passionate about conceptualizing, prototyping, and delivering the next generation of financial services to join the Research group at Wealthfront as Quantitative Researchers. Successful candidates will combine a passion for rigorous analysis, the pragmatism necessary to bring models to data, and a strong desire to work with a unique set of financial and client data. Quantitative Researchers investigate problems spanning portfolio construction (taxable and non-taxable), asset allocation, financial planning, as well as, trade execution and risk modelling. Code and models are the way we express insights and analysis, thus you need to be comfortable working with math, large datasets, and writing significant amounts of code.

Responsibilities:

Develop models and algorithms underlying our financial planning and investment products
Develop actionable insights based on empirical analyses / modeling of relevant data
Contribute to the development of research infrastructure for modelling, optimization, backtesting, analytics, and data management, to ensure an efficient and robust research process
Investigate, identify, and acquire internal / external datasets
Collaborate with other teams (engineering, product, design, marketing, and compliance) to commercialize new products and ongoing enhancements to existing products

Requirements:

PhD degree in economics / finance / operations research / statistics (or a related discipline with a strong focus on quantitative analysis)
Experience analyzing complex data and building statistical models
Strong background in econometrics / statistics / optimization / machine learning
Programming competency in R and / or Matlab and / or Python
Programming competency in SQL preferred
Strong presentation skills and ability to communicate technical content to an audience with varied backgrounds