Financial Engineer, AlphaGen - Vice President

About this role

Are you interested in building innovative technology that crafts the financial markets? Do you like working at the speed of a startup, and solving some of the world’s most exciting challenges? Do you want to work with, and learn from, hands-on leaders in technology and finance?

At BlackRock, we are looking for Software Engineers who like to innovate and solve sophisticated problems. We recognize that strength comes from diversity, and will embrace your outstanding skills, curiosity, and passion while giving you the opportunity to grow technically and as an individual.

We invest and protect over $9 trillion (USD) of assets and have an extraordinary responsibility to our clients all over the world. Our technology empowers millions of investors to save for retirement, pay for college, buy a home, and improve their financial well-being.

Being a technologist at BlackRock means you get the best of both worlds: working for one of the most sophisticated financial companies and being part of a software development team responsible for next generation technology and solutions.

What are Aladdin and Aladdin Engineering?

• You will be working on BlackRock's investment operating system called Aladdin. Aladdin is used both internally within BlackRock and externally by many financial institutions. Aladdin combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive portfolio management, trading, and operations tools on a single platform to power informed decision-making and create a connective tissue for thousands of users investing worldwide.

• Our development teams reside inside the Aladdin Engineering group. We collaboratively build the next generation of technology that changes the way information, people, and technology intersect for global investment firms. We build and package tools that manage trillions in assets and supports millions of financial instruments. We perform risk calculations and process millions of transactions for thousands of users every day worldwide!

Being a member of Aladdin Engineering, you will be:

• Tenacious: Work in a fast paced and highly complex environment
• Creative thinker: Analyze multiple solutions and deploy technologies in a flexible way.
• Great teammate: Think and work collaboratively and communicate effectively.
• Fast learner: Pick up new concepts and apply them quickly.

Our team:

The Alpha Gen Technology group (AGT) helps BlackRock investment teams deliver market leading performance (alpha) to their clients. We work with investment researchers to develop predictive signals and strategies that are traded on BlackRock hedge funds and other active portfolios. The services we provide range from: quantitative library development, model engineering, alpha platform development and investment technology R&D. People in the team are based in London, Budapest, Mumbai, Gurgaon, San Francisco and Sydney. AGT’s Investment partners include Active Equity, Fixed Income, Multi-Asset Strategies, Sustainability Strategies, and the Risk and Quantitative Analytics Team. AGT is part of BlackRock’s Aladdin Engineering.

Aladdin is an investment platform as a service that is used to manage more than $15 trillion by clients of Aladdin.

Your role and impact:

As an Alpha Product Engineer in the Alpha Gen Platform team, you will work closely with Quant engineers to develop an industry leading cloud-first platform that is used for quantitative research as well as in production system to drive daily investment processes. We are involved in the full lifecycle of the Alpha generation platform including design, architecture, development, implementation, tuning, production support and maintenance.

Your responsibilities:

You will be building a groundbreaking, high quality Alpha Gen platform which solves the data and quantitative needs of research and production. It involves:

• Identifying and prototyping new alpha-enabling technology
• Being a hands-on engineer capable of designing solutions for migrating large amounts of critical data to cloud native data stores like Snowflake and Azure Blob Storage.
• Understanding and solutioning for scale in data access and persistence in ingestion pipelines
• Be at the forefront of the technological landscape – understanding modern data lakes, structured file formats, containers and orchestration ecosystems.
• Partnering with other engineering teams at BlackRock to integrate with Aladdin.

You have:

We value post-graduate degree holders, but we also like individuals with equivalent commercial experience. So, if you have a good mix of the skills below, we would love to hear from you!

• 8+ years of proven experience.
• Excellent coding skills in Python. Knowledge of Scala or Java is a plus.
• Experience with distributed technologies supporting analytics and/or microservice development such as Spark, Dask, or Kubernetes is appreciated.
• Desire to build deep expertise in cloud native technologies and design of applications that are deployed to cloud infrastructure.
• A deep engineering mind set - includes practices such as agile, test automation, pipelines and workflows, release management and deployment strategies.
• A good understanding of the modern data ecosystem – Snowflake, Apache Iceberg and Parquet formats, object stores like S3 and/or Azure Blob Storage and orchestration systems like Airflow or Prefect
• A genuine curiosity and appetite to learn
• Good interpersonal skills

What will you learn on the job?

• A deep understanding of the modern data and quantitative ecosystem.
• Building a platform that enables alpha generation at scale.
• Aladdin - the investment platform used to manage >$15 trillion of the global assets.
• How to apply enterprise integration patterns and data science technology to enable alpha generation

Our benefits
To help you stay energized, engaged and inspired, we offer a wide range of benefits including a strong retirement plan, tuition reimbursement, comprehensive healthcare, support for working parents and Flexible Time Off (FTO) so you can relax, recharge and be there for the people you care about.

Our hybrid work model

BlackRock’s hybrid work model is designed to enable a culture of collaboration and apprenticeship that enriches the experience of our employees, while supporting flexibility for all. Employees are currently required to work at least 4 days in the office per week, with the flexibility to work from home 1 day a week. Some business groups may require more time in the office due to their roles and responsibilities. We remain focused on increasing the impactful moments that arise when we work together in person – aligned with our commitment to performance and innovation. As a new joiner, you can count on this hybrid model to accelerate your learning and onboarding experience here at BlackRock.

About BlackRock

At BlackRock, we are all connected by one mission: to help more and more people experience financial well-being.  Our clients, and the people they serve, are saving for retirement, paying for their children’s educations, buying homes and starting businesses. Their investments also help to strengthen the global economy: support businesses small and large; finance infrastructure projects that connect and power cities; and facilitate innovations that drive progress.

This mission would not be possible without our smartest investment – the one we make in our employees. It’s why we’re dedicated to creating an environment where our colleagues feel welcomed, valued and supported with networks, benefits and development opportunities to help them thrive.

For additional information on BlackRock, please visit @blackrock | Twitter: @blackrock | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/blackrock

BlackRock is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.  We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, disability, family status, gender identity, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation and other protected attributes at law.