Senior Associate, Services Developer, AI Enablement

MSCI•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

MSCI is building the next generation of large-scale, high-performance platforms that power critical financial risk and portfolio decisions for the world’s leading institutions. These systems process massive volumes of financial data, expose real-time analytics through service APIs, and increasingly incorporate AI-driven capabilities to improve insight, automation, and usability. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who combines strong hands-on engineering with clear architectural thinking. This role is for someone who enjoys designing systems end-to-end, shaping technical direction, and building scalable services that must be correct, fast, and reliable — while also being excited to apply AI and intelligent automation in real production systems. This is a senior, high-impact role with influence across services, architecture, and engineering practices.

Requirements

Strong experience designing and building high-performance distributed systems.
Excellent grasp of object-oriented design, system decomposition, and data structures.
Proven ability to reason about architecture, not just implement tickets.
Comfort working with large datasets and performance-sensitive systems.
Clear, confident communication with both technical and non-technical partners.
A strong sense of product ownership — you care about outcomes, not just code.
Significant experience with Java and JVM-based systems (Java, Scala, Akka, Spring, etc.).
Service-oriented / microservices architectures.
Spring Boot, REST/gRPC APIs.
Linux/Unix environments.
Build and dependency management (Maven / Gradle).
CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.
Profiling, performance tuning, and memory management in JVM systems.
Version control and collaborative development in globally distributed teams.

Nice To Haves

Python experience (especially for data processing or AI-adjacent services).
Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized deployments.
Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred).
Experience migrating or refactoring legacy systems.
Familiarity with financial instruments, risk, or portfolio analytics.
Exposure to AI/ML systems in production (you don’t need to be a data scientist).

Responsibilities

Design and evolve distributed systems that process and serve high-volume financial data with strict performance and reliability requirements.
Own system architecture and design quality, ensuring solutions are scalable, fault-tolerant, observable, and maintainable.
Build and operate containerized services running in Kubernetes, using service-oriented and microservices architectures.
Collaborate with product managers, business analysts, and researchers to translate complex domain problems into clean technical designs.
Drive technical decisions across teams—API design, data modeling, service boundaries, and integration patterns.
Modernize systems by evolving monoliths toward service-based architectures where appropriate.
Implement robust automated testing (unit, functional, performance) and contribute to CI/CD pipelines.
Participate in production support (2nd tier) with an engineering mindset focused on prevention and system resilience.
Actively contribute to MSCI’s North Star Architecture—our long-term technical vision for scalable, high-performance risk platforms—by influencing platform standards, shared infrastructure, and system design decisions.
Explore and integrate AI-enabled system capabilities, including intelligent data processing or validation, AI-assisted analytics workflows, automation, optimization, and decision support embedded in backend services.

Benefits

Transparent compensation schemes and comprehensive employee benefits, tailored to your location, ensuring your financial security, health, and overall wellbeing.
Flexible working arrangements, advanced technology, and collaborative workspaces.
A culture of high performance and innovation where we experiment with new ideas and take responsibility for achieving results.
A global network of talented colleagues, who inspire, support, and share their expertise to innovate and deliver for our clients.
Global Orientation program to kickstart your journey, followed by access to our Learning@MSCI platform, AI Learning Center , LinkedIn Learning Pro and tailored learning opportunities for ongoing skills development.
Multi-directional career paths that offer professional growth and development through new challenges, internal mobility and expanded roles.
We actively nurture an environment that builds a sense of inclusion belonging and connection, including eight Employee Resource Groups. All Abilities, Asian Support Network, Black Leadership Network, Climate Action Network, Hola! MSCI, Pride & Allies, Women in Tech, and Women’s Leadership Forum.

Stand Out From the Crowd

Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.

Upload and Match Resume