Investments Research Intern

Job Description

We are seeking a quantitative researcher / data scientist to join the Investments 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, optimization, tax efficiency, trade execution, behavioral finance, and will afford you the opportunity to work with a proprietary dataset spanning the investments of hundreds of thousands of clients. 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 code.

Responsibilities:

• Build reproducible backtests for proposed models / algorithms
• Contribute to the deployment and implementation of differentiated investment services
• Contribute to the development of infrastructure for modeling, optimization, backtesting, analytics, and data management
• 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
• Promote our products by providing data and authoring blog posts and white papers

Requirements:

• In the penultimate year of a bachelors or higher degree in mathematics, statistics, economics or computer science (or a related quantitative discipline)
• Experience analyzing complex data and building statistical models
• Programming proficiency in R or Python (preferably with experience employing version control, and testing)
• Programming competency in SQL preferred

Bonus Points:

• Programming competency in Scala or Java
• Experience with AWS cloud computing technologies

Everyone across the financial spectrum deserves to live secure and rewarding lives. In order to successfully serve clients across the United States, the Wealthfront team is focused on hiring team members with a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. 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. About Wealthfront Our first chapter was about transforming the investment advisory business. We focused on unlocking access to low cost investing for delegators - people who were underserved by high fee and human financial advisors. We built the first automated portfolio that allows you in seconds to invest in a personalized portfolio of thousands of companies for a remarkably low fee, which resulted in attracting more than $25 billion of our client’s hard earned savings, created the robo-advisor category and transformed the broader industry. Now, we’ve embarked on expanding into an adjacent opportunity to transform the digital self-directed brokerage space. This focus enables us to empower a dramatically wider audience to build long-term wealth - people who are eager to learn about investing by making their own investment decisions, but need guidance. In the last few years, several financial technology companies have made it incredibly accessible and engaging to trade in individual stocks, but because of their transaction based business models, these apps keep people focused on the day-to-day gyrations of the market leading to short-term thinking and behaviors. As a result, millions of people are investing their hard earned savings in a handful of stocks which is inconsistent with building long-term wealth. We believe our vision serves their needs far better and that we can extend our core philosophy of embracing diversification, managing risk, minimizing fees and taxes and taking a long-term view, into self-directed investing. We believe this is an ideal opportunity to leverage our strength of building simple, easy-to-use products that offer a delightfully engaging experience to build long-term wealth. Apply for this job