Investment Systems Application Engineer - III
About the role
Vanguard seeks an Investment Systems Application Engineer III to join our team. This role is located in Oakland, CA, US and Charlotte, NC, US, with a hybrid work model.
Responsibilities
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
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
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
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
Requirements
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