Lead Quantitative Engineer

Lead Quant Engineer

Risk & Research Technology is responsible for building and operating the firm's analytics technology capabilities that enable investment research, portfolio construction, and risk management across TCW's investment strategies.

The Lead Quant Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for the architecture, technical leadership, and hands-on engineering behind the evolution of the firm's macro and security analytics technology capabilities. This role focuses on building scalable, reusable, and durable technology platforms that enable analytics use cases across multiple investment teams and products.

This role does not include people management responsibilities. Success is measured by platform sustainability, architectural quality, and the ability to enable multiple teams through shared technology capabilities rather than direct ownership of business outcomes.

Business ownership of investment analytics products, research outputs, and investment decisions resides with designated product, research, and investment stakeholders. The Lead Quant Engineer provides technical stewardship and architectural leadership of the underlying technology that enables those business capabilities.

The analytics technology capabilities supported by this role enable Security-level analytics, Macroeconomic and cross-asset signals, Large-scale research and risk workflows.

These capabilities span equities, fixed income, and structured products and operate over large volumes of financial and market data.

The role plays a central part in modernizing legacy analytics environments into modular, distributed architecture while ensuring alignment with enterprise platforms, shared infrastructure, and engineering standards.

Essential Duties

• Provide senior-level architectural leadership and hands-on engineering in support of the evolution of the firm's macro and security analytics technology capabilities.
• Define, modernize, and maintain scalable, reusable analytics architectures, services, and data pipelines aligned with enterprise engineering standards.
• Establish shared design patterns, frameworks, and reference implementations that enable consistent, high-quality contributions across teams.
• Act as a senior hands-on contributor to complex or high-impact technical areas within the analytics technology ecosystem.
• Partner with quantitative researchers, analysts, and investment teams to translate analytics requirements into durable, extensible technology solutions rather than one-off implementations.
• Collaborate with Core Systems, Platform Engineering, and Data Engineering teams to ensure alignment with shared infrastructure, security, and operational practices.
• Influence technical direction through architectural leadership, design review, and technical guidance without reliance on formal authority.
• Champion engineering best practices emphasizing reliability, scalability, observability, performance, and long-term platform sustainability.
• Participate in architectural governance and technical decision-making forums in alignment with enterprise standards.
• Evaluate and integrate third-party analytics tools, financial data providers, and external platforms in a scalable and maintainable manner.
• Provide limited, situation-specific technical guidance and escalation support during significant production issues, including participation in incident reviews and post-incident remediation, while not serving as a primary on-call owner; routine operational monitoring and first-line incident response are handled by established support and platform teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 12 or more years of experience building and supporting production-grade software systems
• Deep experience with distributed systems, backend engineering, and data-intensive platforms
• Strong system design, debugging, and performance optimization skills
• Proven ability to design reusable frameworks and shared technology capabilities
• Experience with modern software development practices including automated testing and CI/CD
• Experience working in cloud-based environments (Azure preferred; equivalent experience considered)

Professional Skills Qualifications

• Strong sense of technical ownership balanced with enterprise alignment
• Ability to operate effectively in complex, multi-stakeholder environments
• Demonstrated technical leadership without reliance on formal authority
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Sound engineering judgment with an emphasis on long-term sustainability

Desired Qualifications

• Experience with financial systems, market data platforms, or investment analytics
• Exposure to fixed income, structured products, macro, or cross-asset analytics
• Experience supporting quantitative research or analytics workflows
• Prior integration with large-scale financial or risk platforms (e.g., Aladdin or equivalent)
• Familiarity with representative technologies such as Python, modern data platforms, workflow orchestration tools, and cloud-native services

Estimated Compensation:

Base Salary: For CA & NY based position, the base salary range is $195k to $225k. This is an anticipated range only.

Other Compensation: Eligible to be considered for an annual discretionary bonus

Benefits: Eligible for TCW's comprehensive benefits package.

This role requires candidates to work from a TCW office a minimum of four days a week. Flexibility for remote work is offered on one day, depending on business needs.