Vice President - Financial Engineering 

About this role

BlackRock is trusted to manage more money than any other investment manager in the world, helping millions of people and the world’s biggest institutions and governments reach their investment goals. We challenge businesses to reach higher standards by leading with purpose and promoting policies and practices that support long-term value creation. We use technology to think beyond what is possible and bring greater transparency to investing while democratizing access.

Our promise to our clients is to deliver products and services that provide clarity on the financial markets to help influence better investments decisions.

As a Financial Engineering VP, you will…

• Participate in the development of the next generation Alpha Quant platform on Aladdin, which aims to unify our existing and already diverse client businesses at the same time as providing a new stream of revenue to the Aladdin business as we make our Alpha Gen technology a product to sell to external clients.

• Partner across the Alpha Engineering group and Portfolio Management groups to deliver strong Alpha-enabling quantitative technology and platforms native to the next-generation cloud experience.

• Improve Developer Experience in all phases of the Model Development Life Cycle, including initial insight capture, interactive exploration of Signals and Models in the Backtesting phase, code hardening to make models Production-ready, and investigation during Production support.

• Develop tactical enhancements to legacy applications. Our team has supported one of the largest active asset management businesses in the world for more than two decades. We require hands-on technical expertise to maintain our existing business while continuously innovating.

• Bring domain expertise in Scientific Python and Financial Technology to enhance performance, best practices, and code quality. In addition to one’s own development, this includes code and architecture reviews, training, and tooling.

• Participate in the full lifecycle of software development – analysis, design, build, documentation, and testing, with a penchant for transformation.

• Drive the adoption of the platform for newly acquired data sets into our database environment and managing all aspects of the loading process.

• Identify, investigate, and resolve data discrepancies by finding the root cause of issues; work with Alpha product engineering to enhance the platform and prevent future occurrences.

• Provide basic reporting and respond to inquiries asking for insights about the platform from senior leaders, in a timely fashion

• Create and execute strategies for cloud native SDLC, ensuring the ability to leverage elastic scale while still having rigorous discipline of unit and integration testing.

• Work with the release manager, dev ops, and prod ops team to ensure solutions are well tested, production ready and well documented.

Example Projects

• Create blueprints for running a complex, multi-step signal computation on an image-based Kubernetes platform – persisting data to cloud-native stores like Snowflake and Azure Blob Storage.

• Creation of a common Cloud-native local development Environment. R&D combines the use of Jupyter Notebooks, IDEs like PyCharm, terminals, and web apps. We are aiming to create a way for all developers to run their code on a common environment, meaning both tools and run-time environment, available to users on Windows, Mac, and VDI.

• Addition of features such as caching, reshaping, checkpointing and idempotency to our quantitative processes.

• Refactoring of signal algorithms to be more horizontally scalable and observable across our platform.

• Translating object-oriented Python solutions into Service-based ones.

• Adding programmatic access to configurations now only accessible via web interface.

• Building out our next generation Docker based image environments and facilitating the adoption of that across our existing landscape.

What You'll Need

• Expertise in Python programming language, its paradigms, and best practices. Expertise across the Software Development Life Cycle, development, testing, building, and release of best-in-class applications. Additional languages a plus.

• Track record of developing compute heavy processes in cloud native environments and developing a DevOps model around it

• 8+ years of experience in the financial services sector, preferably at top-tier asset managers, investment banks, consulting in a data-driven role, or at innovative technology firms.

• Strong multi-functional experience in financial markets, models and data management.

• Ability to clearly articulate and present ideas both in writing and verbally; to senior management as well as outside audiences

• Experience in working on long-term projects and iterative development cycles where constant improvement is expected

• Able to work optimally under pressure and in a rapidly changing environment to meet deadlines

• Focused attention to detail and high standards for quality and accuracy in his/her work product

• Professional, positive demeanor

• Collaborative, team-oriented, service-oriented outlook

• University Degrees in applied scientific disciplines preferred

• Preferable to have experience with Microsoft Azure and Snowflake.

• Preferable to have experience with Docker and Kubernetes