Director, Quantitative Investment Research

aimco; Calgary; On-site; CAD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

AIMCo's Economics & Investment Research (EIR) invites a Director, Quantitative Investment Research to shape portfolio construction and asset allocation. This senior role combines hands-on coding with strategic guidance, delivering disciplined insights to inform investment decisions.

Reporting to the Chief Economist, you will model risks, backtest strategies, mentor analysts, and present actionable results to the CIO and investment committees, driving rigorous, evidence-based decision making.

Qualifications

• Own the analytical frameworks for portfolio construction and asset allocation.
• Develop and backtest macro-driven risk analytics and scenarios.
• Mentor quantitative analysts and set research standards.
• Produce actionable, defendable insights for CIO and investment committees.

Responsibilities

• Lead portfolio construction and asset allocation research.
• Design top-down positioning and translate macro shifts into actions.
• Model systematic risk factors and quantify costs of views.
• Develop risk dashboards and currency hedging frameworks.
• Backtest tactical tilts and document evidence and limits.
• Maintain governance of models and data pipelines.

Skills

Quantitative research

Portfolio construction

Risk analytics

Asset allocation

Data pipelines

Model governance

Backtesting

AI tooling

Job description

CLOSING DATE:

September 26, 2026

Opportunity

The Economics & Investment Research (E&IR) is AIMCo's in-house macro and investment research function. We exist for one purpose: to help the Chief Investment Officer, senior investment leadership, investment committees, investment teams and our clients make better-informed decisions about how capital is positioned.

Our product is a combination of evidence-based analysis, judgement and the tools that sharpen both.

The role

Reporting to the Chief Economist and Head of Economics & Investment Research, the Director, Quantitative Investment Research is the senior quantitative voice within E&IR. You will own the analytical frameworks behind how AIMCo's E&IR thinks about portfolio construction, risk budgeting, and asset allocation - and you will build the systematic tooling that turns those frameworks into something the CIO and investment committees can act on, cycle after cycle.

This is a hands‑on Director role. You will spend a meaningful share of your time in code and data, and the rest translating results for people who will never open your notebook. You will help mentor a few quantitative analysts, setting the research agenda and the standards it is held to.

The work is deliberately positioned close to the decision. Your analysis will not sit in a research library; it will be in front of the CIO, investment committees, as well as clients and it will be debated.

What this role is - and is not

This advisory mandate is total client portfolio construction, risk, and decision support (not a systematic alpha seat for standalone trading P&L). Candidates who want their work to change how CAD $200 billion is positioned will find it rewarding and purposeful.

What you will do

Portfolio construction and asset allocation research

• Own the advisory quantitative frameworks behind client total portfolio construction across CIO office risk optimization and capital allocation scenario analysis.
• Design and evaluate top‑down portfolio positioning and structure - and translate shifts in the macroeconomic regime into concrete, defensible positioning recommendations.
• Model systematic risk factors across the portfolio, forecast their behaviour, and quantify what holding a given top‑down view actually costs.
• Build and maintain the top‑down frameworks around benchmarking, currency hedging, and liquidity management.
• Develop capital market assumptions and the analytics that connect them to portfolio outcomes, including for private market exposures.
• Work within the real constraints of an asset owner: illiquidity, pacing, funding, and governance timelines - not a frictionless optimizer.

Systematic decision support for the Tactical Asset Allocation Committee

• Build and own the systematic toolkit that supports the TAA Committee: regime and cycle models, valuation and momentum indicators, positioning and flow trackers, and complementary risk dashboards.
• Establish a repeatable cadence - the same evidence, produced the same way, every cycle - so that Committee debate is about judgement rather than about whose numbers are right.
• Frame conclusions probabilistically rather than as point forecasts, and be explicit about where consensus is strong, where it is thin, and where we differ.
• Design scenario narratives, with E&IR and Risk Management colleagues, with the transmission channels made visible: what the shock is, how it propagates, and which exposures it reaches first.
• Backtest and stress‑test proposed tactical tilts, and document both what the evidence supports and what it does not.
• Maintain an honest scorecard of past tactical decisions and model performance, and feed that record back into the process.

Risk analytics and stress testing

• Develop top‑down macro factor risk decomposition, stress testing, scenario, and tail‑risk analytics spanning public and private asset classes.
• In collaboration with Risk Management and Multi‑Asset Portfolio Management colleagues, answer the questions leadership actually asks: how much of our risk is really one bet, what breaks in which regime, and what the marginal dollar of risk buys us.
• Partner with Risk Management as a first‑line analytical counterpart - complementing independent oversight rather than duplicating it.

Research platform, data, and model governance

• Own the E&IR quantitative stack: data pipelines, the research environment, code standards, and reproducibility.
• Set model governance standards - documentation, validation, benchmarking, version control, and periodic review - so that any model informing a decision is defensible to investment committees and Risk.
• Apply AI and large‑language‑model tooling deliberately and with judgement: accelerating research, processing unstructured macro and market information, and building governed interfaces to our own data. We are looking for demonstrated, critical application - not enthusiasm.
• Partner with Risk Management, Global Data and Technology, and the asset class teams to source and inte