Application Engineer - Aladdin - Vice President

About this role

Are you interested in building innovative technology that crafts 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 $14 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 is Aladdin and Trading Devops 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. Trading platform is a complex, multi-language codebase (Java, npm/JavaScript, Python, C++) with intricate dependency structures. This role focuses on uplifting developer productivity, modernizing build systems, and driving cloud-native transformation.

Being a member of Aladdin Engineering, you will be:

• Tenacious: Work in a fast paced and highly complex environment
• Creative thinker: Analyse 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.

Qualifications:

• B.E./ B.TECH./ MCA or any other relevant engineering degree from a reputed university.
• 9+ years of experience

Skills and Experience:           

Build Systems & Developer Productivity (Critical)

• 7+ years in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Build Infrastructure roles
• Deep expertise in modern build systems: Hands-on experience with Bazel, Pants, Buck, or Gradle for large-scale, multi-language monorepos
• Proven track record of improving build speeds and success rates in complex codebases (50%+ improvement metrics preferred)
• Experience managing polyglot build pipelines spanning Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript/npm ecosystems
• Strong understanding of dependency management across multiple package managers (Maven, npm, pip, etc.
• Experience with build caching strategies (remote caching, incremental builds, hermetic builds)
• Ability to analyze and resolve complex dependency graphs and circular dependency issues
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.  
• Strong understanding of software development life cycle, agile methodologies, and best engineering practices.  
• Familiarity with source control at scale (Git LFS, Git subtrees, or similar for large binary assets)
• Excellent problem-solving skills and an analytical mindset.  
• Experience taking emotional ownership of the design and development of a significant application, system, or key component. Ability to form positive relationships with partnering teams, sponsors, and user groups in a distributed team environment.  

• Demonstrate an ability to build real-time applications or apps that process large volumes of data yet remain highly responsive even in high-latency environments.
• Experience with the Agile SDLC, with a quality-first mindset and high test-coverage, using test frameworks like Cypress, Jest, Mocha, Karma etc.

CI/CD & Release Engineering

• Expertise designing high-performance CI/CD pipelines for multi-language projects
• Experience with CI platforms: Azure DevOps, GitHub
• Knowledge of artifact management across ecosystems (Artifactory, NPM registry, PyPI)

Cloud-Native & Multi-Cloud

• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes (K8s) for container orchestration
• Experience with multi-cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-agnostic tooling
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code like Terraform
• Understanding of containerization for C++/Java/Python workloads (Docker, buildpacks)
• Experience with GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) for declarative deployments
• Knowledge of service mesh and cloud-native networking patterns

Strategic & Leadership

• Experience acting as technical liaison between product engineering teams and central platform/infrastructure teams
• Ability to influence roadmaps and drive alignment on tooling and platform decisions
• Track record of driving adoption of new tools and practices across engineering teams
• Strong communication skills to articulate technical strategy to senior leadership
• Experience creating migration plans for legacy systems to modern stacks

Language & Ecosystem Expertise (Required)

• Java (Strong): Build tooling (Maven, Gradle, Bazel rules), JVM tuning for builds
• C++ (Moderate to Strong): CMake, Bazel C++ rules, linking/compilation optimization
• Python (Moderate): pip, Poetry, Pants/Bazel Python rules, virtual environments
• JavaScript/npm (Moderate): npm/yarn/pnpm, bundlers (webpack, esbuild), Bazel JS rules

Preferred Experience

• Trading/Financial Systems
• Experience in trading systems, capital markets, or fintech environments
• Understanding of low-latency requirements and their impact on build/deploy pipelines
• Familiarity with regulatory and compliance considerations in financial software delivery

Preferred AI Skills:

• Familiarity with using AI coding assistants to improve DevOps workflows such as CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure‑as‑code authoring, automated testing, and runbook generation.
• Exposure to agentic LLM frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph) to automate multi‑step operational workflows like environment provisioning, release validation, or incident triage.
• Working knowledge of LLMs and prompt design applied to operational contexts such as analysing logs, alerts, metrics, deployment artefacts, or configuration state.
• Experience or interest in building RAG pipelines to enable semantic search across runbooks, monitoring data, post‑mortems, and internal DevOps documentation.
• Awareness of vector databases and embedding‑based retrieval to support incident similarity detection, alert correlation, or operational knowledge retrieval.
• Exposure to applying LLMs for configuration mapping, normalisation, and environment drift detection across cloud, Kubernetes, and legacy infrastructure.
• Interest in AI system reliability concepts such as guardrails, validation, observability, explainability, and human‑in‑the‑loop controls for production operations.
• Familiarity with AI‑assisted operational analytics or decision support, including capacity trends, anomaly detection, and release risk signals.
• Awareness of latency‑sensitive or near‑real‑time AI workflows, particularly for alert enrichment and operational insights in production systems.
• Understanding of AI governance, auditability, and versioning requirements when applying AI in regulated, production‑grade DevOps environments.
• Inclination to enable and mentor teams on pragmatic, safe adoption of GenAI within DevOps, Platform Engineering, and SRE practices.

Competencies:

• Passionate about delightful user experience, building high quality, responsive, persona-based UIs to meet the needs of the future.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Experience or a real interest in finance, investment or portfolio management processes, and an ability to translate business problems into technical solutions.
• Experience taking emotional ownership of the design and development of a significant application, system, or key component. Ability to form positive relationships with partnering teams, sponsors, and user groups in a distributed team environment.

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.