Backtesting Jobs in Boston, MA (NOW HIRING)

Job Description Summary
For over forty years, HarbourVest has been home to a committed team of professionals with an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to deliver impactful solutions to our clients and investing partners. As our global firm grows, we continue to add individuals who seek a collaborative, open-door culture that values diversity and innovative thinking.
In our collegial environment that's marked by low turnover and high energy, you'll be inspired to grow and thrive. Here, you will be encouraged to build on your strengths and acquire new skills and experiences.
We are committed to fostering an environment of inclusion that promotes mutual respect among all employees. Understanding and valuing these differences optimizes the potential of both the individual and the firm.
HarbourVest is an equal opportunity employer.
This position will be a hybrid work arrangement. You will receive 18 remote workdays per quarter to use at your discretion, subject to manager approval. For example, you may choose to work in the office 4 days per week and take one remote day weekly (typically 13 weeks per quarter), leaving 5 additional remote days to be used as needed.
Seated within our Quantitative Investment Science group, the Associate, Quantitative Developer turns machine learning, applied AI, and agentic workflow capabilities into reliable investment workflow software. This is a software engineering role first: you will write production Python, work deeply with data, build model pipelines and evaluation frameworks, and integrate AI-driven capabilities into the tools investment teams use every day. The role is ideal for a practical machine learning engineer who wants to build trusted, auditable systems for high-value quantitative and private markets workflows.
The ideal candidate is someone who has:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a production-oriented machine learning mindset
• A practical interest in using ML and agentic AI to improve investment research, data quality, decision support, and workflow scale
• Healthy skepticism about model outputs, with strong instincts for evaluation, backtesting, monitoring, and human review
• Comfort turning ambiguous analytical workflows into measurable, maintainable production systems
• Strong collaboration skills across quant developers, data engineering, product, and investment stakeholders
• Curiosity about finance, private markets, and the data problems behind investment decision-making

What you will do:

• Build and productionize ML models, feature pipelines, and inference workflows for QIS applications
• Develop semantic matching, ranking, recommendation, and peer-selection systems for funds, managers, deals, companies, and comparable opportunities
• Build unstructured data intelligence, classification, enrichment, and AI-assisted review workflows for complex internal materials and operational datasets
• Design agentic AI workflows that can plan multi-step analyses, call internal tools, retrieve relevant context, and produce traceable recommendations for human review
• Create evaluation frameworks for AI agents, including task success metrics, regression suites, prompt/version tracking, guardrail tests, and failure-mode analysis
• Create model evaluation harnesses, benchmark datasets, backtests, monitoring, drift detection, and quality gates so ML outputs can be measured and trusted
• Integrate embeddings, retrieval, model-serving APIs, agent orchestration, batch jobs, and human-in-the-loop review controls into existing QIS tools
• Partner with data and platform engineers to make ML workflows repeatable, observable, secure, and easy to operate
• Establish practical MLOps patterns for experiment tracking, model versioning, deployment, rollback, audit trails, and production support
• Translate investment workflow needs into pragmatic ML solutions while being clear about limitations, confidence, and operational risk

What you bring:

• Strong proficiency in Python and modern software engineering practices
• Experience with applied machine learning, including feature engineering, model training, evaluation, inference, and monitoring
• Ability to learn and apply the right ML, statistical, and data engineering tools for the problem, with sound judgment around model choice, data representation, reproducibility, and production constraints
• Strong SQL skills and comfort designing data models for analytical or product-facing systems
• Experience building production services, APIs, batch jobs, queues, or scheduled pipelines around data-intensive workflows
• Practical experience with embeddings, semantic search, ranking, recommendation systems, information extraction, agentic AI systems, or LLM-enabled workflows
• Familiarity with agent patterns such as tool use, retrieval-augmented generation, planning, memory, workflow orchestration, and structured human review
• Strong testing habits and ability to debug model behavior using real data, logs, metrics, and user feedback
• Ability to explain model behavior, data limitations, quality tradeoffs, and operational risk to technical and non-technical partners
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, containerized development, CI/CD, observability, and secure production deployment patterns
• Preferred: experience with financial data, time series data, private markets workflows, vector databases, agent frameworks, unstructured data processing, feature stores, model registries, or multi-tenant enterprise systems

Education Preferred
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) or Master's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or equivalent experience
Experience
5-8 years software development experience, with significant production experience in machine learning engineering, data-intensive backend systems, search/ranking systems, quantitative software, agentic AI systems, or applied AI product development
#LI-Hybrid
Base Salary Range
$150,000.00 - $165,000.00
This USD base salary range represents only one component of total compensation for this role and is provided in accordance with local requirements. This role is eligible for a discretionary annual bonus, which is determined based on individual and overall firm performance. In addition to salary and bonus, total compensation may include eligibility for long-term reward programs and a comprehensive total rewards package that may include retirement, health, insurance, paid time off, and wellness programs. Our total rewards offerings are influenced by several business factors, and eligibility for certain components will vary by position and geography. Please note the posted ranges do not apply outside the U.S. and should not be converted to other currencies as a proxy for compensation in other countries.