Data Associate

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. 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 Data Associate, you will help us achieve our mission by owning and deeply understanding the data and logic used to build Bridgewater’s systematic trading systems. This means understanding the content itself, the process by which the content is updated, validated, and evolved and how this content fits into Bridgewater’s understanding of the world. 

In this role, you will be expected to understand both the current data ecosystem and the needs of investment professionals, with a long-term vision for how our investment data ecosystem should scale and adapt over time. You will take ownership of key data workflows, ensuring high standards for investment data quality and consistency across the firm. This is a fast paced, critical function that directly impacts portfolio construction and research alpha. 

We are looking for someone who combines a rigorous analytical mindset with a passion for data, content integrity, and system improvement. The ideal candidate has several years of experience working with data systems. 

Interested in learning more about working at Bridgewater? Hear about the experiences of our employees here. 

You will drive the following responsibilities: 

• Understanding sets of investment “data concepts” - how outside data is used at Bridgewater from both a conceptual investment and technical construction perspective (e.g., pricing, macroeconomic, fundamentals, alternative data). 

• Validating the accuracy of those data concepts - providing domain expertise in content understanding, especially around market, security master, and time-series data. 

• Accepting and engaging with new data as our systematic investment engine incorporates it - refining and maintaining high standards for data engineering and investment data integrity. 

• Continuously evolving these data concepts over time by improving the logic or technical definitions, contributing directly to improving Bridgewater’s investment logic. 

• Working with Bridgewater’s partners in the content supply chain (analytics, engineering, and technology) to address data quality, architectural or logic issues. 

• Collaborating with vendors, engineers, and data consumers to streamline workflows and improve data time-to-insight.

• Operate workflows that enrich and augment unstructured data assets.

• Execute and evaluate data creation for benchmarking of LLM assets and AI tools.

You will be a click for the role if you: 

• Are analytical, highly logical, and structured in your thinking 

• Are deeply interested in understanding financial markets 

• Are passionate about data 

• Think in terms of systems and naturally look for ways to solve problems through the evolution of those systems 

• Hold a high degree of personal responsibility and ownership in everything you do 

• Enjoy learning about new data tools and programming languages

The anticipated onsite requirement for this role is three days per week at our Westport, CT campus and one day per week at our NYC campus

Minimum Qualifications

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. 

• 4-year degree from an accredited undergraduate institution. 

• 2-4 years of relevant experience in data. 

• Strong working knowledge of financial data (e.g., Bloomberg, Refinitiv, alternative data vendors). 

• Experience working with time-series data and security master data. 

• Familiarity with data modeling, data pipelines, and cloud-based data solutions (e.g., Snowflake, AWS). 

• Proficient in at least one programming language. 

• Strong analytical skills, a systems-oriented mindset, and ability to work independently in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.

About Bridgewater

Bridgewater Associates is a global macro investment firm, founded in 1975, whose mission is to develop a fundamental, cause-and-effect understanding of how markets and economies work—and translate that understanding into insights, returns, and solutions that help the world’s leading institutional investors solve their most important investment challenges. 

Over five decades, we have codified our fundamental understanding into a systematic investment process—integrating human judgment with machine intelligence with the goal of applying our thinking consistently, testing it against reality, and continuously improving decision-making over time. We believe this has created a unique platform for applying AI within our process, positioning us at the frontier of integrating technology with investment decision-making. 

In financial markets—where reality is constantly evolving and outcomes are uncertain—sustained excellence requires continuous learning and improvement. Our culture—anchored in radical truth and transparency—helps us learn faster. 

Find more information about Bridgewater on our website.

Our Culture

Bridgewater’s culture is anchored in the pursuit of excellence—tied directly to our mission. In financial markets, where the base case is failure and reality is constantly evolving, winning requires continuous learning and improvement. Truth is our most essential tool for improvement, and transparency helps us get closer to truth because it places many eyes on our decisions, problems, and mistakes. By understanding reality clearly, we can identify the gap between where we are and where we want to be—and use that knowledge to learn and get better. Our system that supports this way of being is an idea meritocracy, where we commit to finding and rewarding the best ideas regardless of hierarchy. 

Operating in these ways is hard. Finding truth and learning through it is inherently a high-friction cycle. It’s possible because we share a few core values: a commitment to honesty, high ownership, deeply meaningful work and relationships, and building Bridgewater as a big tent where vast differences are welcomed. These values create the common denominator that binds us together in good times and bad. 

Benefits

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, including health insurance, retirement benefits, paid leave, and other fringe benefits. Find more information about Bridgewater’s benefits on our website. 

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. 

Sponsorship

Please note that we do not provide immigration sponsorship for this position.  

Compensation

The wage range for this role is $120,000 - $150,000 inclusive of base salary and discretionary target bonus. The expected base salary for this role is between 80% - 90% of this wage range.  

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.

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer