Trading Associate
Required skills
- analytical
- logical
- structured thinking
- communication skills
- nontraditional hours
- intellectual curiosity
- financial markets
- market structure
- game theory
- automation
Nice to have
- engineering work
- overhaul old ones
- analytics team
- liquidity providers
- external vendors
Role summary
Bridgewater Associates, a premier asset management firm, seeks a Trading Associate to execute trades, generate ideas for better trading decisions, and collaborate with strategists and technologists to improve processes. This role focuses on enhancing logic implementation and increasing efficiency within the Trading Execution team. Responsibilities include executing trades according to systematic processes, understanding market microstructure and transaction costs, and developing new systems and strategies. The ideal candidate is analytical, logical, and structured, with excellent communication skills and a deep interest in financial markets. This is a fully on-site role in Westport, CT, with a compensation band of $165,000 - $190,000.
About the Implementation Department
The Investment Implementation department is a community of diverse investment professionals whose mission is to implement our investment strategies and client portfolios excellently. Our Department is responsible for ensuring the excellent implementation of our systematic investment approach, from raw data to executed trades, with processes and logic that reflect the full richness of our investment insight, executed with a near-zero error rate, and engineered and orchestrated in a way that facilitates oversight and compounding. This is an investment department, owning the investment outcomes, and the mandate includes both the ‘run’ responsibility and the ‘transform’ responsibility, meaning daily operations as well as over time renovation of our systems.
We fulfill our mission by applying four operating principles:
About Your Role
As a Trading Associate, you will execute trades, generate and evaluate ideas for how to make better trading decisions, and collaborate with strategists and technologists to constantly improve our processes, focusing on improving the implementation of our logic or increasing efficiency.
This is a fully on-site role (5 days/week), and this employee will work from our office in Westport, CT.
You will drive the following responsibilities:
You will be a click for the role if you:
In addition, to succeed within our unique culture and work environment, individuals must demonstrate humility, innate curiosity, and openness to new ideas and approaches. Candidates must be driven, confident, and goal-oriented. All Bridgewater employees are expected to be honest, exceptionally direct, and eager to provide and receive objective feedback. Our employees constantly strive for self-improvement through feedback and self-reflection and are committed to the pursuit of excellence.
Minimum Qualifications:
About Bridgewater
Bridgewater Associates is a global macro investment firm, founded in 1975, whose mission is to develop a fundamental, cause-and-effect understanding of how markets and economies work—and translate that understanding into insights, returns, and solutions that help the world’s leading institutional investors solve their most important investment challenges.
Over five decades, we have codified our fundamental understanding into a systematic investment process—integrating human judgment with machine intelligence with the goal of applying our thinking consistently, testing it against reality, and continuously improving decision-making over time. We believe this has created a unique platform for applying AI within our process, positioning us at the frontier of integrating technology with investment decision-making.
In financial markets—where reality is constantly evolving and outcomes are uncertain—sustained excellence requires continuous learning and improvement. Our culture—anchored in radical truth and transparency—helps us learn faster.
Find more information about Bridgewater on our website.
Our Culture
Bridgewater’s culture is anchored in the pursuit of excellence—tied directly to our mission. In financial markets, where the base case is failure and reality is constantly evolving, winning requires continuous learning and improvement. Truth is our most essential tool for improvement, and transparency helps us get closer to truth because it places many eyes on our decisions, problems, and mistakes. By understanding reality clearly, we can identify the gap between where we are and where we want to be—and use that knowledge to learn and get better. Our system that supports this way of being is an idea meritocracy, where we commit to finding and rewarding the best ideas regardless of hierarchy.
Operating in these ways is hard. Finding truth and learning through it is inherently a high-friction cycle. It’s possible because we share a few core values: a commitment to honesty, high ownership, deeply meaningful work and relationships, and building Bridgewater as a big tent where vast differences are welcomed. These values create the common denominator that binds us together in good times and bad.
Benefits
One of our core priorities at Bridgewater is to enable our employees to build a great life and career, and we believe our benefits are an important extension of that philosophy. As such, currently Bridgewater offers a competitive suite of benefits, including health insurance, retirement benefits, paid leave, and other fringe benefits. Find more information about Bridgewater’s benefits on our website.
Bridgewater reserves the right to change its current benefits program at any time, in a manner that is consistent with applicable federal and state regulations.
Sponsorship
Please note that we do not provide immigration sponsorship for this position.
Compensation
The wage range for this role is $165,000 - $190,000 inclusive of base salary and discretionary target bonus. The expected base salary for this role is between 70%-80% of this wage range.
One of our core priorities at Bridgewater is to enable our employees to build a great life and career, and we believe our benefits are an important extension of that philosophy. As such, currently Bridgewater offers a competitive suite of benefits. Explore more information about Bridgewater’s benefits on our website here.
This job description is not a contract and confers no contractual rights, privileges, or benefits on any applicant or potential applicant. Bridgewater has the right to change any and all terms of this job description, including, but not limited to, job responsibilities, qualifications and benefits. Nothing in this job description constitutes an offer or guarantee of employment.
Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer
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