Investment Systems Application Engineer - III

The Vanguard Group•Charlotte, NC

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Vanguard is seeking an Investment Systems Application Engineer - III to join their team. This role focuses on designing and building automated testing frameworks for backend services, data pipelines, and end-to-end investment workflows. The engineer will implement controls-by-design to ensure accuracy, consistency, and completeness of investment workflows, and build validation layers to detect data anomalies and discrepancies. The role also involves auxiliary development to support testability and observability, and leveraging AWS for cloud-native validation frameworks. Additionally, the engineer will participate in the software development lifecycle, including design, code, and test reviews, and support production validation and issue analysis. Vanguard is offering visa sponsorship for this position and operates on a hybrid working model.

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).

Nice To Haves

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.

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.
Support development of validation frameworks for portfolio construction, tax‑loss harvesting, and analytics pipelines.
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.
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.
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.