About LearnVest

LearnVest is redefining the American approach to personal finance. Our planners leverage financial technology to create simple, affordable, realistic plans for anyone who wants to feel confident about their money and optimistic about the future. 

Since launching in 2010, LearnVest has been one of the premier financial technology companies in the country, helping thousands of people make progress on their financial goals. LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in 2015 and is now scaling its technology and personal finance approach to help millions of people across both the LearnVest and Northwestern Mutual brands.

Description:

The Planning Algorithms team offers a unique opportunity within the LearnVest organization. At the heart of the acquisition in 2015, our planning software has been used to deliver thousands of financial plans to households across the U.S. We are actively scaling our tools to be used by Northwestern Mutual's field representatives who deliver over a few hundred financial plans per year. Our representatives work with a diversity of households with a wide range of needs, and we are looking for talented engineers to help us expand our financial modeling capabilities to meet them. As a platform team, we provide the simulation architecture that enables planners to create robust models of their clients' lives and deliver advice to help them reach their financial goals.

Members of our team generally follow one of two tracks. We expect all of our developers to gain exposure to both, though most developers will specialize in one or the other.

Core Simulation Engine

This group is responsible for providing a robust simulation engine that our Scenarios and Optimizations team uses to rapidly prototype scenarios reflecting the impacts of various planning strategies. Responsibilities include:

• Modeling cashflow trajectories and providing an API for allocating surplus and covering deficits
• Modeling various financial instruments including a range of debt types, pensions, annuities and various securities
• Simulating portfolio growth and distribution strategies
• Working with data scientists to formalize predictive models
• Working with our architecture team to meet our scaling needs

Scenarios and Optimizations:

This group is responsible for leveraging the core simulation engine to build scenarios our interface teams use to assist the planner in making recommendations for their clients and demonstrating the benefit of that advice. Responsibilities include:

• Designing and implementing optimization techniques for allocation and distribution strategies
• Build an array of what-if scenarios to model the impact of client behavior
• Evaluate planner-driven and algorithmically generated recommendations.
• Analyze the impact of changes to our advice on our client population
• Support a GraphQL based API to make our simulation data widely available to partner teams

Requirements:

• Either:
  • A strong background in engineering complex software systems OR
  • A strong background in financial modeling with some professional programming experience
• Candidates with less finance experience will be expected to go through a rigorous onboarding process to learn those skills
• Willingness to embrace functional programming paradigms (and Scala)

 Benefits

• Fully stocked snacks, beer fridge, cold brew kegs, frequent catered lunches, company dodgeball team, and whiskey hours
• Tuition reimbursement, commuter plans, and paid time off
• Highly competitive compensation that includes base salary plus bonus
• Medical/Dental/Vision plans, Matching 401(k), pension prog