Research Associate - Equities Data Engineer

Team Overview: 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.

Position Overview:

• We are seeking a Data Engineer to join our systematic China equity team. In this hands-on, embedded role, you will work side by side with senior researchers in a fast-paced investment environment, building the data infrastructure and pipelines that support cutting-edge systematic research and investment.
• Unlike centralized data platform roles, this position is deeply integrated with the investment process. You will own the end-to-end data lifecycle that powers alpha research, portfolio construction, and live trading – from sourcing and ingestion to profiling, validation, transformation, and delivery into research and production systems. You will collaborate with our quantitative researchers, developers, and senior investors, and have direct impact on the data and systems that drive investment decisions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Identify, evaluate, and onboard new datasets that can enhance our investment process, assessing their quality, coverage, and long-term value.

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of key investment datasets, from ingestion and modeling through ongoing maintenance, documentation, and evolution as research needs change.

• Develop and maintain robust, scalable data models, ontologies, and schemas that accurately represent investment concepts and enable consistent downstream use.

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines supporting systematic China equity research and production workflows.

• Partner closely with researchers, quantitative developers, and engineering teams to translate evolving research requirements into reliable, maintainable data assets.

• Profile and interrogate datasets to understand distributions, coverage gaps, stability over time, structural breaks, and other characteristics that affect research outcomes.

• Implement data quality checks, anomaly detection, and monitoring to ensure production datasets are accurate, timely, and complete.

• Collaborate with data providers and internal stakeholders to resolve data quality issues, clarify business definitions, and drive enhancements that improve the usefulness of our data.

• Build and maintain relationships with data vendors, staying informed on new products and capabilities through conferences, research, and regular engagement.

• Contribute to improvements in tooling, standards, and best practices that increase research velocity and strengthen the team's data ecosystem.

Key Requirements:

• Fluency in Mandarin required
• 1–5 years of experience as a Data Engineer or in a closely related role, either: embedded with systematic investment teams (hedge fund, asset manager, bank), or in a high-scale, data-intensive technology environment (e.g., consumer, payments, or platform companies).

• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience building production-quality, maintainable data pipelines.

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

• Familiarity with distributed processing and workflow orchestration (e.g., Spark, Airflow, or equivalents).

• Proven ability to reason about data correctness, lineage, versioning, and reproducibility in environments where data errors have material downstream impact.

• Comfort using lightweight statistical analysis and data science techniques to assess data quality, coverage, and suitability for research use.

• Demonstrated experience working with high-dimensional, messy, and evolving datasets, including financial market and reference data (e.g., prices, fundamentals, corporate actions), or large-scale behavioral, transactional, or event-driven data with complex schemas and quality challenges.

• Familiarity with the Chinese equity market, including its market structure and key data sources (e.g., Wind), or broader investment landscape.

• Experience navigating Chinese data realities, including jurisdiction-specific macro definitions, country-specific corporate structures, and uneven disclosure and historical coverage.

What’s next:

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