Investment Systems Application Engineer - IV,- Vanguard Personalized Indexing

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 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

• 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-availability environments

Education Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience

Special Factors

About Vanguard At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission-we're on a mission. To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best. Future of Work During the pandemic, we transitioned to a work from home model for the majority of our crew and we continue to interview, hire, and on-board future crew remotely. As we have developed the path forward, we have taken a thoughtful approach that both maximizes the advantages of working remotely and the many benefits of coming together and collaborating in a shared workspace. We believe that in-person interactions among our crew are important for preserving our unique culture and advantageous for the personal development of our crew. When our Crew return to the office, many will work in our hybrid model. A smaller proportion of our crew will operate in the Work from Home work model (for example, field sales crew); or in the Work from Office model (for example, portfolio managers). The working model that your role falls into will be communicated to you in the interview process - please do ask if you are unsure. We encourage you to make the decision regarding your job interview and offer knowing which model your role will fall into. We will test and learn as our ways of working evolve and will continue to evaluate working models along the way. Salary Range: $100,000.00 - $180,000.00