Research Associate - Commodities Data Engineer

Position Overview: 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.

Key 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

Key Requirements:

• 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. 

• 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
• 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.  

What’s next:

If interested in this position, please contact Michael Kelly at michael.kelly@robertwalters.com