Lead Architect - AI Data Systems, BlackRock Global Markets, Vice President

About this role

Overview

BlackRock Inc. (NYSE: BLK), headquartered in New York, is the world’s largest asset manager, serving individual and institutional investors through over 80 offices worldwide.

Within BlackRock, the BlackRock Global Markets (BGM) group is a core division responsible for providing the firm’s investment teams with access to markets, liquidity, financing, and additional sources of return across index equity, fixed income, trading, and lending businesses.

Within BGM, the Platform - Data & Analytics team builds and supports shared platforms and capabilities that enable BGM teams to reliably discover, access, operate, and use data and analytics in production. This role is a key part of strengthening how we build, run, and scale those platforms—by applying SRE and DevOps principles, automation, and AI-enabled engineering practices.

BlackRock offers a dynamic work environment that values innovation and collaboration. In India, BlackRock has three offices – Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bengaluru. We provide a flexible hybrid work model and modern office amenities (including free meals, ergonomic workstations, and wellness programs) to keep employees healthy and productive. Employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits package featuring extensive health coverage, strong retirement contributions, generous paid time off (including parental leave), continuous learning opportunities, and company-supported volunteer programs.

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Architect - AI Data Systems. We are not hiring for a traditional ETL/data warehouse platform role. This role focuses on distributed systems, real time data infrastructure, and an AI driven platform automation that helps build the next generation of AI-first, highly automated Data Platform services. This role is for a hands-on practitioner who can design and build configurable, scalable systems that ingest and process data into a modern data platform while also creating the service architecture around it, that enables application access, analytics, and derived AI use cases. This person will work closely with Data Quality experts, and will be jointly accountable for reliability with strong controls, policy driven entitlements and reducing manual operational burden

A core expectation of this role is to apply AI throughout the software development lifecycle—from architecture and coding to testing, observability, and operations. The successful candidate will leverage AI-powered development tools and workflows to accelerate delivery, increase automation, and continuously improve system intelligence.

You will work at the intersection of data platforms, distributed systems, and AI-enabled development, shaping both the architecture and the engineering practices used by the team.

As a leader, this position demands a balance of hands-on execution, strategic direction, and mentorship—ensuring our platforms are production-grade, measurable, auditable, and scalable.

Experience & Education

• 10+ years in platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, backend engineering, or related roles, with demonstrated ownership of production reliability and engineering excellence at scale.

• Proven experience building and operating cloud-native services and internal platforms with strong automation and self-service outcomes.

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline

Success Metrics

• Delivered configurable data platform building blocks that scale across use cases, data varieties, data velocity, entitlements across teams in a policy-driven, tenant-aware patterns.

• Demonstrable productivity gains through responsible AI usage in engineering and operations (e.g., AI-assisted test creation, incident diagnostics, and runbook automation).

• Higher automation coverage across operational workflows (health checks, remediation actions, alert routing, recurring tasks) and reduced manual toil.

• Improved service reliability measured through clearly defined operational targets (e.g., availability, latency, error rate) and measurable reduction in production incidents.

Required Skills

Technical

• Scalable Engineering Data Architecture: Ability to design and guide engineering architectures that support large-scale analytics and data-intensive systems (batch and streaming patterns, event-driven designs), for structured and unstructured data without coupling the role to a single data platform.

• Configurable Systems at Scale: Experience building internal platforms and services that are configurable and reusable (policy-driven configuration, shared components, standardized interfaces/SDKs, templates/golden paths).

• Practical AI in Engineering & Ops: Demonstrated use of AI to improve software delivery and operations (e.g., AI-assisted testing, log summarization, runbook automation, alert enrichment, operational insights), with appropriate controls and review.

• SRE / Reliability Engineering: Strong grounding in reliability patterns and operational practices (service ownership, incident response, post-incident learning, operational readiness). Ability to define and drive measurable reliability improvements.

• Observability & Production Diagnostics: Deep experience designing and operating monitoring/alerting and telemetry (logs/metrics/traces), building actionable dashboards, and enabling faster troubleshooting and detection.

Leadership & Strategy

• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor engineering teams, establish high standards for operational excellence, and drive continuous improvement in reliability and developer efficiency.

• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills; ability to translate business-critical outcomes into engineering priorities and measurable delivery plans.

• Ability to influence and align across engineering, infrastructure, and risk/compliance partners to deliver resilient, well-governed systems.

• Bias for automation and simplification: consistently eliminates toil, standardizes patterns, and creates leverage through reusable platform capabilities.

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.