Technologist / Team Builder / Product Leader
Paul Kauders
I'm a technologist who builds products and leads the teams behind them. Most recently I built the analytics platform for Northwestern Mutual's Public Investments department from scratch with a lean team. 75+ investment professionals use it every day, and they'll tell you it beats systems that cost far more. My domain has been finance. The skills transfer: I learn a business end to end, build the product it needs, and attract the people who make it better.
What I bring
01
Products, end to end
At Northwestern Mutual I built the whole platform: data models, data tests, pipelines, and the application on top. It's configuration driven, so users compose their own dashboards and slice metrics themselves instead of waiting on engineering. The analytics push down to Snowflake as SQL, which is why almost any question comes back in seconds.
02
Teams from scratch
I attract strong people and keep them motivated. The analytics practice at Northwestern Mutual started as one seat, mine, and grew into the lean team that ships the platform today. I stay close enough to the work to write the data models and review the code, and I don't ask of my team what I won't do myself.
03
I learn the business
My domain has been investing and insurance, and I learned it properly: CFA, a master's in computational finance, years working beside the people who use what I build. That's the transferable part. I go deep on how a business works, then build the technology that fits it. I've done it as a startup co-founder and inside $100B+ institutions.
Experience
All case studies →Director, Quantitative Research & Analytics
Northwestern Mutual
2021–present
Built the $130B analytics platform and lead the team behind it. 75+ investment professionals use it daily. Sit on the firm's AI committees.
Analyst to Risk & Analytics IT Development Manager
State of Wisconsin Investment Board
2012–2021
Nine years, three roles. Modernized the $100B+ fund risk model, pioneered quant strategies through live trading, $50M automation win.
Associate Analyst, Equity Research
T. Rowe Price
2007–2010
Technology sector equity research, firm-wide tooling.
I have worked with Paul for over two years. He is a diligent, creative and intellectually curious person. A pleasure to work with personally and always reliable. I would recommend him without reservation.
David Eiswert
Portfolio Manager, T. Rowe Price
Writing
All posts →Adoption is the metric
Internal tools don't fail at launch. They fail three weeks later, quietly.
Driving AI inside an investment firm
The committee, the platform, and the gap between vendor demos and reality.
Snowflake + Streamlit vs. Power BI and Tableau
The case for the data product mindset in investment analytics.
Working together
Building something ambitious with data and AI?
I build platforms from scratch and the teams that run them. If your company needs someone who will learn your business, ship a product your people love, and attract the talent to scale it, I'd like to hear from you.