Careers at Wealthfront

Mission

Wealthfront is an automated investment service that makes data-driven investment opportunities accessible and affordable to investors throughout the United States.

Service

Wealthfront targets tech-savvy millennials by offering personalized automated investment accounts with significantly lower fees. Accounts are customized according to several factors, including individual tax status and the assessed level of each investor’s risk tolerance. Wealthfront has teams of engineers and researchers that work to support its investment platform. Its team works in the following areas:

• Automated investing, the heart of Wealthfront’s business, which is to simplify and automate investments that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive using existing channels. Costs are comparatively low for individual investors, and accounts under $10,000 are free. The company’s investment management team is led by economist Dr. Burton Malkiel, and the investment strategy guided by Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Wealthfront emphasizes diversification and offers both non-retirement and more traditional retirement accounts.
• Tax-loss harvesting. Wealthfront emphasizes tax-efficient investing. It has an automated software service that implements automatic tax-loss harvesting; this service is available to all Wealthfront investors, not just the company’s wealthiest clients. Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy used to lower taxes while maintaining the profile of the investment portfolio.
• Research. Wealthfront has a team of researchers and advisors working as part of its investment team, which guides the design of the automated investment algorithms used by Wealthfront. Nine members of the company’s research team (out of eleven total) have doctorates; these individuals are drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines, including economics, finance, law, and data science.
• Engineering. A large in-house team of software engineers designs, supports, and maintains the complex software platform that powers Wealthfront. The engineering team emphasizes a quick code-to-deploy strategy, meaning it is continually working on and implementing solutions and fixes.

History

Based in Palo Alto, California, Wealthfront, which was originally named kaChing, was founded in 2008 by Dan Carroll and Andy Rachleff, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Rachleff, a co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, was Wealthfront’s original CEO and remains the company’s Executive Chairman.

Wealthfront has raised around $130 million, with its most recent funding round completed in October 2014. In 2015, the company reached $2 billion in assets under its management, a figure which has now risen to $3 billion, reflecting its strong sustained growth.

Benefits at Wealthfront