Investment Associate at Bridgewater Associates in New York, NY

For 50 years, Bridgewater has pursued one idea: the world can be understood. Markets and economies follow cause-and-effect relationships—and by understanding them, we think we can beat the markets and generate true uncorrelated returns ("alpha") at significant scale. Our clients include some of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors who turn to us to use our unique insights to solve their biggest problems.

Generating alpha at scale is an exceptionally difficult task. It requires predicting the future and doing so better than the millions of other extremely smart, highly motivated people who are trying to do the same. Our investment strategies seek to understand and navigate macroeconomic shifts that drive the world’s most liquid markets (bonds, currencies, equities, commodities, credit). These shifts have a very limited sample size (some of them haven’t yet happened in our lifetimes).

Our approach is to start by digging deep to develop a fundamental cause-effect understanding of the economic and financial relationships that drive markets. We represent this understanding in a model of the world that we call our System—code and algorithms that generate views automatically, by ingesting vast amounts of significantly cleaned data and reflecting the relationships we’ve learned over decades of intense study and experience. Being systematic allows us to stress-test the quality of our ideas through time, and also helps ensure that at any given point, our positions reflect everything we’ve ever learned, so that our people can spend all their time focused on compounding on our understanding at a faster rate than markets are learning.

This approach requires us to be at the forefront of human-machine collaboration. Since 2012, Bridgewater has aggressively pursued the vision of the artificial investor that can do everything a human can, with computers not just representing the insights but also generating the insights themselves. In 2023, we introduced AIA (Artificial Investment Associate), our fully machine-powered investing strategy. Our learnings in building AIA are now transforming even our human investors’ jobs, allowing us to rapidly discover and systemize new insights, and accelerating our transformation toward a fully integrated system that combines the best of human and machine intelligence.

Every day we obsessively interrogate our systems against our independent investor insights, and work to evolve our systems to reflect how the world is changing. Beating the markets with this approach requires intense collaboration between brilliant people who constantly push themselves and each other to improve every week, to arrive at the best ideas without ego or politics. We rapidly elevate the best thinkers to greater responsibility.

We are looking to hire great talent for our Investment Associate roles. Does this sound like you?

Investment Associates sit at the frontier of how Bridgewater learns and invests. They are equal parts investor, engineer, and inventor—building and evolving the systems that power one of the world's largest hedge funds. We are looking for people with backgrounds in quantitative fields—computer science, machine learning, mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering—who have spent a few years building real systems and now want to apply that capability to understanding how economies and markets work and translating that understanding into systematized investment decisions.

Who you are

A builder and an inventor. You don't just want to understand markets—you want to build systems that encode that understanding and operate on it every day. You think in whole systems, not individual models—you see the full architecture from insight to investment decision and you want to own it end-to-end. You're already experimenting with new technologies before most people understand them, because you immediately see how they can be applied to hard problems. You are ambitious, self-directed, and undeterred by ambiguity. You don't wait for a roadmap; you build the first version yourself.

A rigorous, flexible problem solver. You bring intense analytical rigor to everything you do—probing assumptions, stress-testing logic, and making sure the answer is actually right, not just plausible. When a problem demands a technique you haven't used before, you learn it on the fly. You can abstract up from the mechanics to see the deeper structure of a problem—and apply that understanding to situations you've never encountered before.

Relentlessly, obsessively curious. To beat markets, you must have unique insight—but markets are always learning. You are fiercely driven to understand how the world works, uncovering new logical relationships, testing and exploring new data sources, and consistently expanding your understanding.

A deeply independent—bordering on iconoclastic—thinker. For decades, Bridgewater has been studying markets and economies and reflecting our best understanding in our investment systems. We need people who will come in and tell us why what we're doing and thinking is wrong—and be right about it.

Able to draw insights across disciplines. Our investment approach draws from economics, finance, computer science, mathematics, statistics, political science, history, natural science, and more. The best Investment Associates see connections others miss—between a technique from machine learning and a problem in macro forecasting, between a pattern in geopolitics and an opportunity in portfolio construction.

Collaborative, gritty, and determined to grow rapidly. The problems we solve are so hard and multifaceted that they require continuous, intense collaboration. Grit is essential—many of the problems don't have immediate or clear answers, and wrestling through to the truth alongside others takes enormous perseverance. We need people who push themselves and each other to improve every week, without ego or politics. If you prefer to work as an individual, this is not for you. If the pain of being pushed to evolve each day doesn't excite you, this is not for you.

What you'll do

For fifty years, we've been turning our understanding of how the world works into systems that trade global markets. You'll push the frontier of how we do it.

Architect, own, and evolve the systems behind our investment edge. Every day, our algorithms process vast data on economic conditions and form views on markets—one of the world's most advanced and profitable expert systems. You will build, own, and interrogate these systems: developing and probing our most sophisticated investment logic, identifying where it breaks, and devising new analytical approaches to push it forward. The hardest problems here don't yield to off-the-shelf methods.

Invent new ways of investing. With the launch of AIA, we're entering a fundamentally new era in how humans and machines collaborate to invest. We need people who can connect emerging technologies to our highest-priority investment questions and devise practical solutions that change how we research, build systems, and learn. You won't just be using new tools—you'll be reimagining the process itself.

Oversee portfolios and live and breathe the markets. Your systems trade global markets every day, and you will know them cold—their logic, their edges, their blind spots. You'll form independent market views and use that tension between human judgment and system output to drive continuous improvement. The best system owners are the ones who never stop asking: where is this wrong?

Research the drivers of economies and markets. Build the insights that underlie our investment edge by tackling some of the hardest analytical problems in macro—problems that demand exceptional rigor, creative use of a wide range of quantitative methods, and the ability to go from an abstract question to a concrete, testable answer. Recent priorities have included the shift to the new paradigm we call modern mercantilism and the macro implications of transformational advances in artificial intelligence.

What you bring

• A strong foundation in a quantitative or technical discipline—computer science, machine learning, mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, or a related field
• A few years of professional experience building systems, models, or quantitative tools—whether in technology, finance, research, or another demanding environment
• A problem-solving orientation: analytically rigorous and detail-oriented, but able to flexibly learn new methods to get from concept to execution
• Genuine intellectual passion for understanding how economies and markets work—not just modeling them, but understanding the causal mechanics
• Fluency in at least one programming language commonly used in quantitative research or systems development

Compensation

The total compensation range across these roles is $225,000–$450,000 inclusive of base salary and discretionary target bonus. The expected base salary is typically 50%–75% of the relevant range, depending on team, level, and experience.

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 Investment Associate 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