Our mission is pretty simple: we believe that everyone deserves access to sophisticated financial advice. Over the past five years, Wealthfront has built a technology company focused on re-architecting the finance industry, and along the way we’ve created a new category known as automated investment services (aka ‘robo-advisors’, but truth be told we’re fairly light on robots). What that actually means is we build software that enables us to democratize access to services typically reserved for the ultra-wealthy, and through automation we can deliver those services to investors at an incredibly low cost. And it’s working; we have clients across the country who trust us with nearly $6.5 billion in assets -- and we’re just getting started!
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We are seeking Quantitative Researchers to join the Research team at Wealthfront. The primary responsibility of the role is to investigate and develop proprietary, automated investment strategies addressing our clients' various investment problems. Your focus will span topics related to asset allocation, portfolio construction (taxable and non-taxable), investment vehicle selection, tax efficiency, optimization, trade execution, behavioral finance, as well as, risk modeling and risk tolerance assessment. Successful candidates will combine an ability to derive and apply quantitative models to the empirical analysis of financial and client data. Code and models are the way we express insights and analysis, thus you need to be comfortable working with large datasets and writing significant amounts of R code.
Responsibilities:
- Develop portfolio optimization models and investment algorithms
- Build reproducible backtests for proposed models / algorithms
- Conduct empirical statistical analysis / modeling on relevant data and develop actionable insights
- 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:
- Masters or PhD degree in finance / economics. Candidates from related disciplines with a strong focus on quantitative analysis (e.g. operations research, statistics) are also encouraged to apply.
- Experience analyzing complex data and building statistical models
- Strong background in econometrics / statistics; experience with optimization desired
- 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
More About Wealthfront:
Wealthfront is the only robo-advisor to offer both investment management and financial planning exclusively through software. Because of this approach, we've quickly become the automated advisor of choice among young people. Anyone can open a Wealthfront investment account with $500 to access a unique Passive+ investment strategy that includes a combination of a diversified portfolio of ETFs and tax minimization strategies. All clients receive financial planning through the service, Path, at no additional cost. Wealthfront does not charge management fees on the first $10,000 and for amounts above that the annual management fee is 0.25% - a fraction of what financial advisors charge. Wealthfront's strategy is to take high end financial services that are reserved for those who have millions of dollars and deliver them to young consumers through software. The majority of Wealthfront clients are in their 30s and 40s and have less than $1 million to invest. Wealthfront was founded by Andy Rachleff and Dan Carroll, who launched the service in December 2011. Wealthfront has raised over $129 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Social + Capital and Spark Capital, and is based in Redwood City, CA. For more information please visit www.wealthfront.com.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.