Research Associate, Equities Data Engineer

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. 

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 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. 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.

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

• Experience working with modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake or similar cloud data warehouses).

• Familiarity with distributed processing and workflow orchestration (e.g., Spark, Airflow, or equivalents).

• Proven ability to reason about data correctness, lineage, versioning, and reproducibility in environments where data errors have material downstream impact.

• Comfort using lightweight statistical analysis and data science techniques to assess data quality, coverage, and suitability for research use.

• Demonstrated experience working with high-dimensional, messy, and evolving datasets, including financial market and reference data (e.g., prices, fundamentals, corporate actions), or large-scale behavioral, transactional, or event-driven data with complex schemas and quality challenges.

• Familiarity with the Chinese equity market, including its market structure and key data sources (e.g., Wind), or broader investment landscape.

• Experience navigating Chinese data realities, including jurisdiction-specific macro definitions, country-specific corporate structures, and uneven disclosure and historical coverage. 

In addition, to succeed within our unique culture and work environment, individuals must demonstrate humility, innate curiosity, and openness to new ideas and approaches. Candidates must be driven, confident, and goal-oriented. All Bridgewater employees are expected to be honest, exceptionally direct, and eager to provide and receive objective feedback. Our employees constantly strive for self-improvement through feedback and self-reflection and are committed to the pursuit of excellence.

Physical Requirements

The anticipated onsite requirement for this role is four days per week at our New York City campus.

Why Choose Bridgewater?

It takes all types to make Bridgewater great. We seek a diverse group of innovative thinkers and push them to engage in rigorous and thoughtful inquiry. We develop people through an honest examination of their abilities and performance, enabling personal growth and professional development. We strive to provide you with opportunities that will challenge you and unlock your potential. 

Compensation Band

• The expected annual base salary for this position is $150,000-$200,000. The total compensation package includes variable compensation in the form of a discretionary target bonus.

One of our core priorities at Bridgewater is to enable our employees to build a great life and career, and we believe our benefits are an important extension of that philosophy. As such, currently Bridgewater offers a competitive suite of benefits. Explore more information about Bridgewater’s benefits on our website here.

Bridgewater reserves the right to change its current benefits program at any time, in a manner that is consistent with applicable federal and state regulations. 

This job description is not a contract and confers no contractual rights, privileges, or benefits on any applicant or potential applicant. Bridgewater has the right to change any and all terms of this job description, including, but not limited to, job responsibilities, qualifications and benefits. Nothing in this job description constitutes an offer or guarantee of employment. Please note that we do provide immigration sponsorship for this position. 

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer