Senior Finance Associate, Accounting

Bridgewater Associates•Westport, CT

2d•$165,000 - $235,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Finance Associate on Bridgewater's Corporate Accounting team, your primary responsibility will be the accounting and reporting of the Company’s expanding foreign operations, reporting to the Controller responsible for that area. Additionally, you will provide leverage to the Head of Accounting Policy and Reporting by performing technical accounting analyses and supporting the financial reporting process for the Company’s domestic entities. You will help lead how we use process change and technology to make reporting and accounting sharper, faster and better controlled. This is a highly visible role that will put you in direct contact with external auditors, third-party service providers, and stakeholders across the Finance Department. You will develop a diversified skill set and breadth of knowledge that are highly valued across the firm.

Requirements

Exceptional ownership mentality, willing to roll up your sleeves and problem solve
Proactively and independently use AI fluently in your work while bringing enough technical depth of your own to review its output for accuracy and completeness
Capable project manager who can drive to deadlines and hold stakeholders accountable without relying on formal authority
Genuine appetite for rethinking how the work gets done — questioning processes and tools and pushing for better, better-controlled ways to account and report, rather than settling for incremental tweaks
Strong critical thinking skills, with a natural curiosity to ask "why" and question the status quo
Enjoy making sense out of white-space and ambiguous situations
Think analytically, logically and agilely; can quickly iterate in a fast-paced environment and high-performance culture
Excel at relationship building across stakeholders at all levels of the Company, as well as with external auditors and third-party service providers
Highly organized, reliable and detail oriented, with an eye for spotting and correcting errors
Bachelor's degree or higher in accounting, with a strong academic track record
5-7 years of accounting or audit experience, ideally with hands-on exposure to project management and to coordinating across teams to get things done; Big 4 background a plus
CPA or actively working towards the certification
Experience in operational accounting, including processes and controls
A solid understanding of how financial statements are assembled and experience working within draft statements to get them right
Experience working with AI tooling, paired with the subject matter expertise to review AI-generated output for accuracy and completeness (we currently use Claude, though our tooling may change over time)
Solid technical accounting skills (i.e., the ability to research an accounting question and reach a supportable, well-documented conclusion)
Advanced Excel skills

Nice To Haves

Experience with other financial systems, such as Workday, Office Connect or Power Query preferred

Responsibilities

Project manage the annual audits of these entities’ statutory financial statements, which are prepared under local statutory GAAP (IFRS based)
Serve as a primary point of contact for the external auditors, resolving requests and comments directly where appropriate and coordinating input from others across the organization as necessary
Ensure that transactions are accounted for (both technically and operationally) and reported on correctly. For subsidiaries in which we use external service providers to prepare monthly and annual reporting packages (trial balance, account reconciliations, balance sheet, profit and loss statement, cash flow statement, and related schedules), review their work critically for accuracy, completeness and appropriate accounting treatment and ensure it is appropriately loaded into our general ledger
Field questions from and proactively raise accounting issues with the Business Planning and Analysis team responsible for our foreign subsidiaries
Actively incorporate AI tooling to enable and streamline processes, helping to push the efficiency of existing work streams while reimagining how they get done
Perform technical accounting analyses of new transactions (US GAAP), creating new accounting policies and/or updating existing policies, and adopting/implementing new accounting standards.
Support the quarterly and annual financial reporting process for our domestic operations.