Vice President, Database Engineer

JOB DESCRIPTION

BlackRock is a leader in investment management, risk management and advisory services for institutional and retail clients worldwide. In Dec 2023, BlackRock’s AUM was $9.42 trillion. BlackRock helps clients meet their goals and overcome challenges with a range of products that include separate accounts, mutual funds, iShares® (exchange-traded funds), and other pooled investment vehicles. BlackRock also offers risk management, advisory and enterprise investment system services to a broad base of institutional investors through BlackRock Solutions®. Headquartered in New York City, as of January 1, 2023, the firm had approximately 23,000 employees in 30 countries and a major presence in key global markets, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East and Africa. For additional information, please visit the Company’s website at www.blackrock.com | Twitter: @blackrock_news | Blog: www.blackrockblog.com | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/blackrock

The Aladdin® product unites the information, people, and technology needed to manage money in real-time at every step in the investment process. Aladdin enables organizations to communicate better, work smarter, see clearer, and move faster in a changing landscape.  Aladdin combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive portfolio management, trading and operations tools on a single platform to power informed decision-making and create connective tissue for thousands of users investing worldwide.

Your team 

The Database Engineering team is an integral part of Platform Hosting Services within the Aladdin Engineering Group. Platform Hosting Services is responsible for the reliability, stability, and performance of the firm's financial systems, including Aladdin, ensuring their availability to our business partners and customers.  
Our team’s primary focus is to deliver resilient, scalable, and high-performing database platforms by leveraging automation, software engineering, and modern DevOps practices.

Your role and impact: 

Data is the backbone of any world-class financial institution. The Database Operations Team is tasked with ensuring the resiliency and integrity of that data, whilst providing instantaneous access to a large global user base at BlackRock and across many Institutional Clients. As preeminent specialists on database technology, our team is involved in every facet of system design, implementation, tuning and monitoring, using a wide variety of industry-leading database technologies.

We also develop code to provide analysis and insight and to automate & scale our solutions.

Although the team’s specialty is database technology, in order to excel in our role, we need to understand the environment that our technology operates in; understanding of the business needs, the application server stack, the interaction between the database software, the operating system and host hardware are significant factors allowing us to deliver the best service possible.

We are passionate about performance and innovation. From the top of the firm down, we embrace the diversity of values, identities and ideas brought forth by our employees and offer phenomenal flexibility to enhance work life balance.

Your responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain automation tools and frameworks for database provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance.

• Build APIs and self-service platforms to empower internal teams to manage database resources efficiently.

• Engineer solutions for database configuration management, schema migrations, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.

• Develop monitoring, alerting, and analytics systems to ensure database reliability and performance.

• Collaborate with operational DBAs to identify manual processes and automate them using code.

• Participate in incident response and root-cause analysis, developing tools to prevent recurrence.

• Contribute to the adoption of DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code practices within the database team.

You have…

• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Java, with experience building production-grade automation or tooling.

• Experience with database platforms such as Apache Cassandra, CosmosDB, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP Sybase ASE, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and data warehouse platforms like SAP Sybase IQ, Greenplum, and Snowflake.

• Familiarity with data replication offerings like Sybase Rep, MSSQL HA, HVR (FiveTran).

• Experience with public cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and their database offerings.
  Knowledge of source control systems (GIT, Azure DevOps) and CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience with automation tools like Ansible/AWX and operating systems like Linux and Windows.

• Experience developing monitoring, alerting, or analytics solutions for infrastructure or databases.

• A passion for automation, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
  Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and a drive to innovate.

• A belief in data-driven analysis and problem solving, and the drive to scale technology to the needs of tomorrow.

If you are excited about using software engineering to transform database operations at scale, we want to talk to you about joining our team.