Senior Finance Associate, Accounting

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 for 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.  

Explore more information about Bridgewater’s culture on our website here.  

The Finance Department

Finance leads Bridgewater’s financial strategy and serves as a strategic advisor to businesses across the firm. We partner with leaders to translate strategy into financially sound plans, evaluate growth opportunities, and make informed decisions about how to allocate capital. Our work builds financial resilience and drives long-term shareholder value, supported by rigorous analysis, reporting, and controls. We are also transforming how Finance operates, using AI and automation to deliver faster insights and focus more of our expertise on the decisions that shape the firm’s future. 

About the Role:

As a Senior Finance Associate on Bridgewater's Corporate Accounting team, your primary responsibility will be the accounting and reporting of the Company’s expanding foreign operations, reporting to the Controller responsible for that area. Additionally, you will provide leverage to the Head of Accounting Policy and Reporting by performing technical accounting analyses and supporting the financial reporting process for the Company’s domestic entities. You will help lead how we use process change and technology to make reporting and accounting sharper, faster and better controlled. This is a highly visible role that will put you in direct contact with external auditors, third-party service providers, and stakeholders across the Finance Department. You will develop a diversified skill set and breadth of knowledge that are highly valued across the firm.

You will drive the following responsibilities:

Under the supervision of the Controller responsible for the accounting and reporting of our foreign subsidiaries:

• Project manage the annual audits of these entities’ statutory financial statements, which are prepared under local statutory GAAP (IFRS based) 
• Serve as a primary point of contact for the external auditors, resolving requests and comments directly where appropriate and coordinating input from others across the organization as necessary
• Ensure that transactions are accounted for (both technically and operationally) and reported on correctly. For subsidiaries in which we use external service providers to prepare monthly and annual reporting packages (trial balance, account reconciliations, balance sheet, profit and loss statement, cash flow statement, and related schedules), review their work critically for accuracy, completeness and appropriate accounting treatment and ensure it is appropriately loaded into our general ledger
• Field questions from and proactively raise accounting issues with the Business Planning and Analysis team responsible for our foreign subsidiaries
• Actively incorporate AI tooling to enable and streamline processes, helping to push the efficiency of existing work streams while reimagining how they get done

While the accounting and reporting of our foreign operations will be your primary responsibility, you will also have the opportunity to support the Head of Accounting Policy and Reporting with accounting policy and reporting needs, such as performing technical accounting analyses of new transactions (US GAAP), creating new accounting policies and/or updating existing policies, and adopting/implementing new accounting standards. Further, you may be asked to support the quarterly and annual financial reporting process for our domestic operations.

You will be a click for the role if you:

• Possess an exceptional ownership mentality, willing to roll up your sleeves and problem solve
• Can proactively and independently use AI fluently in your work while bringing enough technical depth of your own to review its output for accuracy and completeness
• Are a capable project manager who can drive to deadlines and hold stakeholders accountable without relying on formal authority
• Have a genuine appetite for rethinking how the work gets done — questioning processes and tools and pushing for better, better-controlled ways to account and report, rather than settling for incremental tweaks
• Show strong critical thinking skills, with a natural curiosity to ask "why" and question the status quo
• Enjoy making sense out of white-space and ambiguous situations
• Think analytically, logically and agilely; can quickly iterate in a fast-paced environment and high-performance culture
• Excel at relationship building across stakeholders at all levels of the Company, as well as with external auditors and third-party service providers
• Are highly organized, reliable and detail oriented, with an eye for spotting and correcting errors

We are looking for candidates with the following minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in accounting, with a strong academic track record
• 5-7 years of accounting or audit experience, ideally with hands-on exposure to project management and to coordinating across teams to get things done; Big 4 background a plus
• CPA or actively working towards the certification
• Experience in operational accounting, including processes and controls 
• A solid understanding of how financial statements are assembled and experience working within draft statements to get them right
• Experience working with AI tooling, paired with the subject matter expertise to review AI-generated output for accuracy and completeness (we currently use Claude, though our tooling may change over time)
• Solid technical accounting skills (i.e., the ability to research an accounting question and reach a supportable, well-documented conclusion)
• Advanced Excel skills
• Experience with other financial systems, such as Workday, Office Connect or Power Query preferred

Physical Requirements

The onsite requirement for this role is four days per week at our Westport, CT headquarters campus.

Compensation

The wage range for this role is $165K-$235K inclusive of base salary and discretionary target bonus. The expected base salary for this role is between 80% - 90% of this wage range.

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 opportunities that will challenge you and unlock your potential.   

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 not provide immigration sponsorship for this position.   

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer