Application Support Engineer

About AQR Capital Management 

AQR is a global investment firm built at the intersection of financial theory and practical application. We strive to deliver concrete, long-term results by looking past market noise to identify and isolate the factors that matter most, and by developing ideas that stand up to rigorous testing. By putting theory into practice, we have become a leader in alternative strategies and an innovator in traditional portfolio management since 1998.

At AQR, our employees share a common spirit of academic excellence, intellectual honesty, and an unwavering commitment to seeking the truth. We’re determined to know what makes financial markets tick – and we’ll ask every question and challenge every assumption.  We recognize and respect the power of collaboration and believe transparency and openness to new ideas leads to innovation.

Your Role 

We are seeking an Application Support Engineer who will work at the boundary of the technical systems and processes that drive our investment business. This is an individual contributor role where you will work on a dynamic team to support a sophisticated technical process and user-base, resolve production problems as they arise, and contribute to strategic projects that improve our organization. You will learn a cutting-edge cloud-deployed quantitative portfolio management and research system. You will work closely with both the business and other technical teams. 

We are seeking someone who is passionate about technology and systems reliability, who is looking for an opportunity to grow into a systems reliability engineer. 

In this role. You will:

• Develop and maintain in-depth knowledge of AQR’s Applications products to support customers.
• Manage users’ expectations to ensure satisfaction with AQR and our products
• Ensure that every user is treated professionally and with respect
• Act as a user advocate to Project Management and Development
• Effectively interact with Quality Assurance to report bugs identified by customers.
• Ensure proper escalation occurs for unresolved issues to ensure the customer remains satisfied
• Gain and maintain current knowledge of AQRs Support Policies and Procedures
• Participate in on-call production support rotations – some of which may be off hours.
• Identify/update missing prod-support processes and author new processes with the assistance of dev/business-teams using a support wikis.
• Diagnose missing-inputs issues. This may require analyzing stack-traces, system-logs, stepping through code in a debugger etc. to find the offending query/web-service call.
• Diagnose resource issues (e.g., database down/slow, etc.).  This would require learning our deployment architecture, alerting/monitoring tools, etc.
• Diagnose complex system issues and work across teams to solve them quickly.
• Reason through technical issues using an array of technical skills including log analysis, systems performance analysis, stack-trace diagnosis, database analysis, reproduction of problems, and software debugging.
• Manage communication with stakeholders and across teams.
• Contribute to our systems and process documentation.
• Understand and document root-causes of problems and collaborate across teams to deliver improvements.
• Work on strategic projects to improve our over process and system reliability.

What You’ll Bring

• Bachelor’s Degree – Engineering or Computer Science preferred – or equivalent experience.
• Two years’ experience working with both business user and technical teams supporting complex software systems in the financial industry.
• Hands-on technical abilities including SQL and programming/debugging – Python preferred.
• Strong technical communications abilities – both written and verbal.
• Ability to work effectively both independently and in a small team environment.
• A passion for learning technology and using it to automate manual work and improve system reliability.
• Cool under pressure and always responsible, mature, and trustworthy.

The salary range for this role is expected to be $110,000-$140,000.  This is the range that we in good faith believe is accurate for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, depending upon factors such as skills, experience, location, or other business and organizational needs.  This wage range may also be modified in the future.

This job is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus.

We offer comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance, 401(k), and any other benefits to eligible employees.

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.

AQR is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  EEO/VET/DISABILITY