Investment Systems Application Engineer - III

Vanguard; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Vanguard is seeking a test-focused engineer in Charlotte, North Carolina, to design and build automated validation frameworks for their investment workflows. This engineering role emphasizes coding responsibility and requires strong programming skills in Python or Java.

The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience in financial systems, expertise in automated testing frameworks, and an understanding of investment concepts. Vanguard is also offering visa sponsorship for this position.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering or test engineering in financial systems.
• Strong programming skills, preferably in Python or Java.
• Experience with data-intensive systems validating quality and accuracy.

Responsibilities

• Design and build automated testing frameworks for investment workflows.
• Implement controls to ensure accuracy and completeness in workflows.
• Support production validation and post-release checks.

Skills

Python

Java

Automated testing frameworks

Data validation

Job description

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 at scale. Our 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 test‑focused engineer to design and build automated validation frameworks and platform controls that ensure correctness, reliability, and auditability of VPI’s investment workflows. This is not a traditional QA role—this is an engineering role with strong coding responsibility, focused on building scalable testing frameworks while contributing to application and platform development where needed. Candidates are expected to bring prior experience building or supporting investment or financial systems and demonstrate a solid understanding of investment workflows and data accuracy requirements.

Test Engineering & Automation Frameworks

• Design and build automated testing frameworks for backend services, data pipelines, and end‑to‑end investment workflows
• Develop regression testing, scenario validation, and deterministic validation suites for portfolio calculations, tax logic, and trading workflows
• Create reusable testing tools, harnesses, and datasets (e.g., golden datasets, synthetic data generation)
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous validation

Controls & Validation (Investment Systems Focus)

• Implement controls‑by‑design to ensure accuracy, consistency, and completeness of investment workflows
• Build validation layers that detect data anomalies, workflow breaks, and calculation discrepancies
• Ensure traceability and reproducibility of results to meet audit and regulatory expectations
• Support development of validation frameworks for portfolio construction, tax‑loss harvesting, and analytics pipelines

Auxiliary Development (Backend / Data / Full‑Stack Support)

• Contribute to backend services or data pipelines to enable testability, observability, and validation hooks
• Develop supporting APIs, utilities, or UI components that aid in testing, debugging, and workflow validation
• Improve system instrumentation to enable better monitoring and validation

Cloud & Engineering Practices (AWS)

• Build and run validation frameworks on AWS using scalable, cloud‑native patterns
• Integrate testing tools into CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows
• Contribute to observability (logging, metrics, tracing) to support validation and issue diagnosis

SDLC & Production Support

• Participate in design, code, and test reviews to ensure quality is built in early
• Support defect identification, triage, and root cause analysis
• Contribute to production validation, reconciliation checks, and post‑release verification
• Ensure solutions comply with information security and technology policies

Experience Required

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, test engineering, or platform engineering within investment, wealth management, or financial systems
• Strong programming skills in Python (preferred) or Java
• Experience building automated testing frameworks (unit, integration, and end‑to‑end)
• Solid understanding of investment domain concepts (portfolios, positions, transactions, tax lots, trading lifecycle, or analytics workflows)
• Experience working with data‑intensive systems and validating data quality and accuracy
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments (AWS preferred)

Preferred

• Experience implementing controls, validation frameworks, or reconciliation processes in financial systems
• Exposure to model validation, analytics validation, or calculation verification workflows
• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and event‑driven architectures
• Familiarity with observability tools and debugging complex production systems

What Success Looks Like

• You build robust automated validation frameworks that significantly reduce production defects
• You improve confidence in investment workflows by ensuring correctness and reproducibility
• You embed testing and control mechanisms directly into system design and delivery pipelines
• You act as a quality multiplier—raising engineering standards across the VPI platform

Sponsorship

Vanguard is offering visa sponsorship for this position.