Commodities Research Associate

Bridgewater Associates is a premier asset management firm focused on delivering unique insight and partnership for the most sophisticated global institutional investors. Our investment process is driven by a tireless pursuit to understand how the world’s markets and economies work — using cutting-edge technology to validate and execute on timeless and universal investment principles. Founded in 1975, we are a community of independent thinkers who share a commitment to excellence, fostering a culture of openness, transparency, and inclusion.

Our Culture

Our culture is anchored in excellence, meaning constant improvement, and is deeply tied to our mission. Markets are objective and competitive, requiring rapid improvement to stay ahead. Truth is our most essential tool for engaging with markets and driving improvement. We value transparency in decision-making, humility in feedback, and prioritizing the best answers over hierarchy or ego. This culture is challenging but rewarding, built on meaningful work and relationships. Our foundation is Ray Dalio’s Philosophy Statement and 300+ Principles, which continue to evolve, with a recent focus on Meritocracy. Today, our culture is a core competitive edge that powers everything we do.

About The Team

This role sits in our Asia Strategies department, whose goal is to be the premier investment management firm in Asia. The team develops investment strategies, generates alpha, researches macroeconomic environments, and designs client solutions across the region. Within Asia Strategies, the Asia Commodities team is responsible for generating alpha and managing risk, with research and signals feeding directly into Bridgewater’s largest funds in the region, including the Asia Total Return Fund, China Total Return Portfolio, and Pan-Asia Total Return Fund.

About Your Role

We're seeking a Data Engineer to join the Commodities team within Asia Strategies, embedded directly on the desk with direct impact on trading strategies and exposure to the CIO and Senior PMs. You’ll work in a tight-knit, fast-paced environment where the pipelines and data you own feed directly into live investment decisions. This role emphasizes:

• Direct ownership of vendor data relationships and quality.
• Research-adjacent problem-solving — understanding the team’s data needs before analyzing it.
• Data operations spanning the full research cycle, from raw vendor feed to modeled data to live dashboards and trading indicators.
• Sitting inside the investment process and developing expertise in Asia Commodities as an asset class.

You’ll drive your own agenda, spotting gaps and pushing fixes proactively. We’re looking for someone entrepreneurial and resourceful, who wants to build serious infrastructure while staying close to live trading decisions.

Responsibilities

• Investment Data Engineering, Research/Production Enablement, and Platform Collaboration
  • Source and maintain vendor data feeds, resolving data quality issues and communicating new features.
  • Transform granular, contract-level market data into derived analytical constructs (e.g., curves, spreads, aggregated indicators) that feed directly into research and portfolio decisions.
  • Build data infrastructure for fundamental supply/demand balance models — from raw inventory, production, and shipment data to balance-ready inputs.
  • Build and maintain dashboards and monitoring tools the team relies on daily — tracking data health and market conditions, flagging breaks or shifts before they affect the book.
  • Partner closely with investors and developers to ensure data is research-ready, well-documented, and reproducible across simulation and live environments.
  • Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable data pipelines supporting systematic commodities strategies.
  • Interrogate datasets to understand distributions, coverage gaps, stability over time, and structural breaks.
  • Design and maintain our data ontology and schemas.
  • Work across traditional and large alternative datasets.
  • Collaborate with shared data engineering and platform teams to evolve the broader data ecosystem while maintaining team-level ownership and agility.
  • Contribute to improvements in tooling, standards, and best practices that increase research velocity and system reliability.
• Research & Data Science
  • Partner with investors to research commodity markets and commodity-producing companies, with a focus on Asia and Chinese commodities markets, and turn insights into systematic trading strategies.
  • Provide fundamental context to data decisions — flagging when data quality issues or vendor discrepancies have market explanations worth surfacing to the research team.
  • Incorporate AI/ML technologies into the team's research and data infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 2–4 years of experience in a data engineering, data science, or analyst role at a commodity trading house, hedge fund, or research organization with exposure to commodities markets.
• Familiarity with metals fundamentals and commodities market data preferred; experience with other commodities (e.g., Ags, PetChem) is a plus.
• Experience with systematic commodities trading strongly preferred.
• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience writing production-quality, maintainable code.
• Experience with modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake or similar cloud data warehouses).
• Willingness to expand toolkit to adapt to our Scala-based production stack.
• Strong desire to work with new development assistant technologies to drive productivity.
• Experience designing, documenting, and scaling commodities data and trading systems.
• Solid foundation in statistics, particularly time-series and cross-sectional analysis.
• Mandarin proficiency strongly preferred.
• Humility, innate curiosity, and openness to new ideas and approaches.
• Drive, confidence, and goal-orientation.
• Commitment to honesty, directness, and providing/receiving objective feedback.
• Dedication to self-improvement through feedback and self-reflection.

Schedule

The anticipated onsite requirement for this role is four days per week at our New York City campus or in our Singapore office.

Benefits

Bridgewater offers a competitive suite of benefits designed to enable employees to build a great life and career. Benefits are subject to change consistent with applicable regulations.

Pay

The expected annual base salary for this position is $150,000–$200,000. The total compensation package includes variable compensation in the form of a discretionary target bonus.