Applied AI Engineer

About this role

When BlackRock was started, its founders envisioned a company that combined the best of financial services with cutting edge technology. They imagined a business that would provide financial services to clients as well as technology services to other financial firms. The result of their vision is Aladdin, our industry leading, end-to-end investment management platform. Our technology empowers millions of investors to save for retirement, pay for college, buy a home and improve their financial wellbeing.

Data & AI

Data is at the heart of Aladdin. We have been employing AI methods for 10+ years and started our AI Lab in 2018. We have specialist leaders in fields including optimization, data science, machine learning and natural language processing. The ability to consume, store, analyze and gain insight from data has become a key component of our competitive advantage. The Aladdin AI team is responsible for the AI ecosystem within BlackRock. Our goal is to build and maintain a leading-edge AI platform for all users of the platform, notably investors, operations teams and data scientists. We focus on evolving our platform to deliver exponential scale to the firm, powering the future growth of Aladdin.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the next generation of the world's best investment management technology platform, focusing on managing various investment lifecycle processes and investment research.
• Design and deploy advanced machine learning models.
• Leverage and build AI/ML infrastructure to develop new platform services.
• Integrate new AI services across the platform and Aladdin application ecosystem.
• Refine business and functional requirements and translate them into scalable technical designs.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to implement comprehensive AI/ML-based solutions from start to finish.
• Apply quality software engineering practices throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Optimize the software delivery and workflow of the team.
• Work with team members in a multi-office, multi-country environment.

Requirements

• B.S./M.S. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related subject area with 2-4 years of proven experience, or equivalent experience, for Associate positions and 4-8 years, or equivalent experience, for Vice President or Technical Architect positions.
• Strong proficiency and hands-on experience in object-oriented programming with Java and Python.
• Proficiency in designing and building scalable APIs and Microservices.
• Familiarity with event-driven architecture and messaging frameworks like Kafka.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure (Preferred), AWS, or GCP.
• Experience with NoSQL datastores like Cassandra
• Knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Ability to reverse engineering existing applications.
• Grit in the face of technical obstacles
• Experience working in Agile development teams with excellent collaboration skills.

Nice To Have

• Understanding of prompt engineering and prompt tuning.
• Experience building applications using LLM frameworks such as LangChain, Llama Index, and Semantic Kernel.
• Experience with vector databases like Faiss or Chroma
• Knowledge of ML model evaluation to ensure consistent performance with changing data.
• Familiarity with MLOps and ML model lifecycle pipelines.
• Experience with ML model training and fine-tuning.