Patrick McDowell | Investment Risk & Front-Office Engineering

Investment risk practitioner who builds front-office tools. At Wellington Management, a $1.4T asset manager, I work with Barra risk models and Wellington’s proprietary internal risk model across equity portfolios. I also engineer the tools portfolio managers use for factor risk, scenario analysis, optimization and pre-trade analysis, including a risk platform used daily by 100+ investment professionals. I understand the portfolio problem and can build the tooling myself in Python and SQL.

01 Experience

Wellington Management

Investment Risk Analyst · Risk Strategy, Equity

London · 2022-Present

Portfolio Construction & Risk

Use Barra risk models alongside Wellington’s proprietary internal risk model across the equity portfolios I cover, assessing factor exposures and active risk from complementary perspectives to inform portfolio construction decisions.
Work directly with portfolio managers and investment teams to interpret what the models are saying about their exposures and risk.
Designed and backtested an optimized lower-risk equity strategy that helped win an institutional client pitch and was adopted into client materials.
Built portfolio optimization and scenario-analysis tools that carry risk-model output into portfolio construction and investment decisions.

Equity Risk Explorer

Conceived, designed and built Wellington’s flagship equity risk platform, in production and used daily by 100+ portfolio managers, risk managers, client strategists and senior leaders. It started as a side idea, not a mandate.
Brings holdings, factor exposures, attribution, historical analytics, scenarios, returns and pre-trade analysis from 6+ internal systems into one workflow for portfolio decisions.
Wrote and maintain the thousands of lines of Python behind its seven analytical modules, each designed around how investors actually analyze portfolios rather than as a generic dashboard.
Grew adoption well beyond the original audience by building iteratively with the portfolio managers and risk managers using it.

AI Tooling: Risk MCP

Designed and built the team’s internal platform on the Model Context Protocol for knowledge retrieval and dashboard generation, so non-developers can build their own analytical tools with AI.

02 Selected Projects

Box Out

boxoutfantasy.com

Fantasy basketball analytics platform I built and run on Python, FastAPI and PostgreSQL, calibrating its recommendations on each ESPN league’s own history. Backtested across 616 historical decisions; live with 22 managers across 3 leagues.

Sons & Daughters of the U.S. Middle Passage

sdusmp.patrickmcdowell.dev

Advised a national lineage society on using AI for archive search and registrar review, and designed with them the working product mockup now being implemented.

03 Earlier Experience

Senior Financial Analyst · Wellington Management

London · 2020-2022

Automated reporting pipelines in SQL and Python so executives could explore assets, revenue, net client growth and regional performance on demand.
Built self-service Tableau reporting used by senior leaders across EMEA and APAC, replacing fragmented Excel workflows and reducing a recurring monthly reporting cycle by roughly 40 analyst-hours.

Fund Controller · Wellington Management

Boston · 2017-2020

Built Python tools that generated financial statement disclosures from holdings data, accounting rules and security classifications, automating workflows across 200+ investment funds.
Reduced financial statement review from roughly three hours to 30 minutes through automated validation; the tools were standardized across the team.

Financial Analyst · Arrowstreet Capital

Boston · 2015-2017

Wrote complex SQL for operational and business analytics and automated recurring reporting with SQL, Excel and Python.

Audit Associate · KPMG

New Jersey · 2012-2015

Taught myself VBA to automate repetitive reconciliations and reduce manual copy-and-paste, establishing the habit of rebuilding a process instead of repeating it.

04 Skills

Investment & RiskPortfolio construction, investment risk, factor risk, Barra risk models, proprietary risk models, risk attribution, scenario analysis, portfolio optimization, pre-trade analysis, performance analytics

EngineeringPython, SQL, Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Git, Plotly and Tableau, APIs and data pipelines

Front Office & ProductInvestment analytics, portfolio manager workflows, decision-support systems, interactive analytics, requirements discovery, working directly with investors

AILLMs, Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI-assisted development, internal AI applications

05 Education

Rider University · B.S. in Accounting