Investment Systems Application Engineer - IV,- Personalized Indexing

hackajob is collaborating with Vanguard to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

Vanguard Personalized Indexing (VPI) is a rapidly growing business within Financial Advisor Services. We enable financial advisors to deliver tax efficient, customized direct indexing portfolios  platform manages thousands of investor accounts and evaluates portfolios daily to support tax loss harvesting, customization, and investment research workflows.
VPI operates at the intersection of investment management, cloud native platforms, and advanced analytics engineering. The technology we build directly supports investment research, portfolio construction, and data driven decision making that impacts client outcomes.

We are seeking a senior level backend engineer to lead the design, development, and scaling of core investment platform services. This role requires deep hands on engineering capability combined with strong technical leadership across distributed systems, APIs, and data intensive workflows.

The ideal candidate brings extensive experience building investment or wealth management systems and demonstrates a strong understanding of investment workflows across portfolio construction, trading, and data processing.

This role is expected to operate at a senior engineer level with hands on coding, influencing architecture, mentoring junior engineers, and driving system reliability for mission critical investment platforms.

Core Responsibilities

Backend & Platform Engineering

• Design and build scalable backend services and APIs supporting portfolio construction, optimization, trading, and analytics workflows
• Develop high performance, production grade systems using Java and/or Python with strong focus on reliability and maintainability
• Architect and implement microservices and event driven systems to support high volume, latency sensitive workloads
• Ensure application performance, scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency across distributed systems
• Integrate internal and third party systems, ensuring seamless interoperability and data consistency

Technical Leadership & System Design

• Provide senior level system design, architecture guidance, and technical direction across backend and platform components
• Lead design and code reviews, ensuring alignment with engineering standards and architectural principles
• Evaluate and recommend technology solutions, design patterns, and implementation approaches
• Anticipate system and platform risks; proactively design solutions to prevent production issues
• Mentor engineers and elevate technical execution across the team

Investment Systems & Domain Alignment

• Develop a deep understanding of investment management workflows, including portfolios, trading lifecycle, and data pipelines
• Design systems that support front, middle, and back office functions while maintaining strong controls and auditability
• Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions aligned with investment processes
• Ensure systems meet accuracy, consistency, and regulatory expectations for financial applications

Cloud & Engineering Practices

• Build and operate cloud native services on AWS using containerized architectures and Kubernetes
• Drive adoption of CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure as code practices
• Improve observability, monitoring, and operational readiness across platform components
• Contribute to architectural evolution toward scalable, cloud native systems

SDLC & Operational Excellence

• Ensure the viability and quality of investment systems deliverables through rigorous testing and validation
• Lead and participate in design, code, and test inspections across the SDLC
• Support production systems, including incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation
• Ensure compliance with Information Technology and Information Security policies
• Promote continuous improvement in engineering practices, standards, and system reliability

Additional Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain deep knowledge of Vanguard's platform ecosystem and integration points
• Collaborate with cross functional teams and stakeholders to deliver high impact capabilities
• Participate in special initiatives supporting the growth and scalability of the VPI platform

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8+ years of experience, including significant experience building investment, wealth management, or financial systems
• Strong backend engineering expertise in Java and/or Python
• Deep understanding of investment domain concepts including portfolios, trading workflows, market data, and investment analytics
• Proven experience designing and building scalable distributed systems and APIs
• Experience with microservices architectures, messaging systems, and asynchronous processing patterns
• Strong experience with cloud native platforms, particularly AWS
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes preferred)
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence system design decisions
• Strong problem solving and production support experience in high…