Commodities Research Associate

Our culture is anchored in excellence, meaning constant improvement, and it is deeply tied to our mission. Because markets are objective, competitive, and getting smarter everyday, we need to keep rapidly improving to have any chance of beating them. Truth is our most essential tool for engaging with the markets and constantly improving because once you know what's true about your problems and opportunities, you can determine how to get better. Valuing truth means being transparent about your decision-making and mistakes, giving and receiving feedback with humility, and fighting for the best answers over hierarchy, ego, or self-interest. Operating this way is hard – it's only possible because we build meaning in our work and relationships. This meaning comes from the audacity of the mission, and the joy of working alongside people who make you a better version of yourself. The culture, like Bridgewater itself, is always evolving. In 1997 our founder Ray Dalio wrote down his lessons, starting with a Philosophy Statement which remains our foundation. This later evolved into a set of 300+ Principles. In 2022, when Ray transitioned the company, we re-underwrote several of those principles and evolved others, with a specific focus on Meritocracy. Today the culture sits, alongside our people, as our most important edge. When we get it right, it’s the engine that powers everything else.

About the Team

This role sits in our Asia Strategies department, whose goal is to continue our growth down the journey of being the premier investment management firm in Asia. This entails developing great investment strategies reflecting our expertise, generating alpha in the markets, researching and publishing our understanding of the macroeconomic environment, and designing solutions to help our clients invest across the region.

Within Asia Strategies, Asia Commodities is a dedicated investment team responsible for generating alpha and managing risk. The team's research and signals feed directly into the commodities strategy for Bridgewater's largest funds in the region, including the Asia Total Return Fund, China Total Return Portfolio, and Pan-Asia Total Return Fund.

About Your Role

We're seeking a Data Engineer to join the Commodities team within Asia Strategies, embedded directly on the desk with direct impact on trading strategies and exposure to the CIO and Senior PMs responsible for key Asia strategies. You'll work in a tight-knit, fast-paced environment where the pipelines and data you own feed directly into live investment decisions.

This position emphasizes (1) direct ownership of vendor data relationships and quality, (2) research-adjacent problem solving — understanding why the team needs the data concepts before you analyze it, (3) data operations spanning the full research cycle, from raw vendor feed to modeled data to live dashboards and trading indicators, and (4) sitting inside the investment process and developing expertise in Asia Commodities as an asset class.

Given the size of the team, you'll drive your own agenda rather than wait to be told what's next — spotting a gap before it's flagged, pushing through a fix rather than escalating and waiting. We're looking for someone entrepreneurial and resourceful, who wants to build serious infrastructure while staying close to a live book and the decisions it drives.

You will drive the following responsibilities:

Investment Data Engineering, Research/Production Enablement, and Platform Collaboration

• Source and maintain vendor data feeds, working directly with vendors to resolve data quality issues and communicate new features

• Transform granular, contract-level market data into derived analytical constructs — curves, spreads, aggregated indicators — that feed directly into research and portfolio decisions

• Build the data infrastructure that feeds fundamental supply/demand balance models — from raw inventory, production, and shipment data to balance-ready inputs

• Build and maintain dashboards and monitoring tools the team relies on daily — tracking both data health and market conditions, and flagging breaks or shifts before they affect the book

• Partner closely with investors and developers to ensure data is research-ready, well-documented, and reproducible across simulation and live environments

• Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable data pipelines supporting systematic commodities strategies.

• Interrogate datasets to understand distributions, coverage gaps, stability over time, and structural breaks

• Design and maintain our data ontology and schemas

• Work across a variety of datasets ranging from traditional datasets to large alternative datasets

• Work with shared data engineering and platform teams to evolve the broader data ecosystem while maintain team-level ownership and agility

• Contribute to improvements in tooling, standards, and best practices that increase research velocity and system reliability

Research & Data Science

• Partner with our investors to research questions on commodity markets and commodity-producing companies, with a specific focus on Asia and Chinese commodities markets, and turn that understanding into systematic trading strategies

• Contribute fundamental context to data decisions – flagging when a data quality issue or vendor discrepancy has a market explanation worth surfacing to the research team

• Incorporate AI/ML technologies into the team's research and data infrastructure

Interested in learning more about working at Bridgewater? Hear about the experiences of our employees here.

Qualifications

• 2–4 years of experience in a data engineering, data science, or analyst role at a commodity trading house, hedge fund, or research organization with exposure to commodities markets.

• Familiarity with metals fundamentals and commodities market data preferred. Additional experience with other commodities (e.g. Ags, PetChem) would be a plus.

• Experience with systematic commodities trading strongly preferred.

• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL preferred. Experience writing production-quality, maintainable code

• Experience working with modern data platforms (e.g. Snowflake or similar cloud data warehouses)

• Willingness to expand toolkit to adapt to our scala based production stack

• Strong desire to work with new development assistant technologies to drive productivity

• Experience designing, documenting, and scaling commodities data and trading systems

• Solid foundation in statistics, particularly time-series and cross-sectional analysis

• Mandarin proficiency strongly preferred

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.

Physical Requirements

The anticipated onsite requirement for this role is four days per week at our New York City campus or in our Singapore office.

Why Choose Bridgewater?

It takes all types to make Bridgewater great. We seek a diverse group of innovative thinkers and push them to engage in rigorous and thoughtful inquiry. We develop people through an honest examination of their abilities and performance, enabling personal growth and professional development. We strive to provide you with opportunities that will challenge you and unlock your potential.

Compensation Band

• The expected annual base salary for this position is $150,000-$200,000. The total compensation package includes variable compensation in the form of a discretionary target bonus.

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.

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.

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. Please note that we do provide immigration sponsorship for this position.

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer