Job Application for Portfolio Engineer at Bridgewater Associates

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.

About the Implementation Department

The Investment Implementation department is a community of diverse investment professionals whose mission is to implement our investment strategies and client portfolios excellently. Our Department is responsible for ensuring the excellent implementation of our systematic investment approach, from raw data to executed trades, with processes and logic that reflect the full richness of our investment insight, executed with a near-zero error rate, and engineered and orchestrated in a way that facilitates oversight and compounding of knowledge. This is an investment department, owning the investment outcomes, and the mandate includes both the ‘run’ responsibility and the ‘transform’ responsibility, meaning daily operations as well as over time renovation of our systems.

We fulfill our mission by applying four operating principles:

Understand and deliver internal client needs. Partner with our internal clients to understand, offer implementation designs, and deliver solutions, while proactively educating and communicating outcomes to ACLs (Asset Class Leads) and CIOs.
Own our investment intent. Own our investment intent in full, in letter and spirit.
Continuously improve. Have and evolve an investment pipeline to meet current and future internal client needs.
Systematically and relentlessly deliver quality outcomes. Apply our best logic systematically, discipline, expertise, and controls to every signal, position, and trade in every market.

About Your Role

As a Portfolio Engineer at Bridgewater, you’ll sit at the crossroads of investment strategies, analytics, and trade implementation - helping transform Bridgewater’s ideas into real portfolios that move markets.

Your mission is to solve the puzzle of managing money at material scale - from risk controls through trade generation. You’ll connect investment intent with real-world execution, ensuring every position reflects the full richness of our insights with precision and scale.

Portfolio Engineers must think like builders and portfolio managers. You’ll collaborate closely with investment teams and technologists - bridging the gap to engineer solutions.

What You’ll Do

Architect portfolio systems that translate investment strategy into executable trades, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and efficient.
Partner cross-functionally with investors, trading, data, and engineering teams to diagnose issues, streamline processes, and bring investment logic to life.
Design and enforce standards for portfolio construction, risk control, and trade generation - balancing investment precision with operational excellence.
Visualize and industrialize workflows, helping us scale our portfolio management processes.
Own and evolve oversight tools to validate that portfolios are behaving as intended and capital is being deployed effectively.

Who You Are

2+ years of experience in engineering, data science, or a quantitative investment environment.
Strong problem-solving instincts and a desire to use technology to solve high-stakes, real-world problems.
Fluent in programming (Python, Scala, or SQL) and comfortable reasoning through complex systems.
Excellent communicator who can translate technical concepts for both engineers and investors.
Self-motivated, detail-oriented, and energized by working across disciplines to get to the best answer.

Career Growth at Bridgewater

From day one, you’ll be on a deliberate growth path:

Structured onboarding and apprenticeship: Build a deep understanding of how Bridgewater manages portfolios at institutional scale.
Progressive ownership: Start by owning individual subsystems and evolve toward managing full portfolio processes end-to-end.
Cross-functional exposure: Work directly with investors, system architects, and trading teams — gaining a 360° view of how capital is deployed.
Leadership development: As you gain experience, mentor junior engineers and help shape our systems, culture, and investment platform.
Career mobility: Bridgewater encourages growth across teams — Portfolio Engineers often transition into broader investment system ownership or leadership roles.

Physical Requirements

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

Compensation Band

The wage range for this role is $225,000–$450,000 inclusive of base salary and discretionary target bonus. The expected base salary for this role is between 60% - 75% 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.

The Portfolio Engineer full time position requires the candidate to be eligible to work in the United States for a minimum of 3 years from the candidate’s start date. If visa sponsorship is required for any part of the three years, the successful candidate must demonstrate continuous, or eligibility to renew, work authorization in the United States for at least three years after the date of hire, without being subject to selection through a lottery process.

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer 

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Portfolio Engineer

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