Director, Database Platform Engineering & Operations

About this role Your team The Database Hosting team sits within Aladdin Engineering and is responsible for building and running resilient, secure, and high-performing database platforms that underpin BlackRock’s investment and risk technology ecosystem. We operate critical, enterprise-scale data services that power global workflows for internal users and institutional clients. We are globally distributed and operate in a follow-the-sun model, partnering with application engineering, infrastructure, cyber, and risk stakeholders to deliver world-class reliability and service management across on-prem and cloud environments. Your role and impact You will help set the strategy and execution agenda for database platform engineering and operations, ensuring BlackRock’s most critical data services meet the highest standards for availability, performance, resiliency, and security. You will partner with global engineering and operations teams to deliver operational excellence for Microsoft SQL Server at scale, while accelerating adoption of Azure cloud-native database capabilities to best serve our internal and external client needs. You will help champion automation, observability, and AI enablement across the database estate, leveraging telemetry, intelligent diagnostics, and modern engineering practices to proactively prevent incidents, improve mean time to recovery, and continuously optimize performance and cost. Success in this role requires deep technical credibility paired with executive-level communication. You will influence architecture and engineering decisions across application stacks, networking, storage, operating systems, and cloud infrastructure, translating business outcomes into platform roadmaps and measurable service-level objectives. We value curiosity, ownership, and disciplined engineering. You will help cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and operational rigor, enabling teams to deliver stable, scalable platforms that keep pace with the firm’s growth and innovation. Key responsibilities You will serve as a senior technical leader, helping shape engineering standards and drive 24/7 operational excellence for database platforms supporting mission-critical investment systems, balancing strategy, delivery, risk management, and hands-on technical stewardship. Help drive enterprise reliability outcomes for database services (availability, performance, resiliency) and promote service-level objectives sssbased operational rigor, including incident/problem/change management and executive communications. Help set the multi-year platform strategy and roadmap for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure database capabilities. Drive modernization, upgrades, migrations, and consolidation programs through strong technical governance and stakeholder alignment. Partner with cyber, risk, and engineering stakeholders to strengthen governance for capacity, security, backup/restore, disaster recovery, patching/vulnerability remediation, and audit readiness. Help scale a software-defined operations model through automation and modern DevOps practices (CI/CD, infrastructure as code), improving speed, consistency, and control. Help advance observability and AI enablement by standardizing telemetry and leveraging intelligent diagnostics to proactively detect issues, accelerate recovery, and optimize cost/performance. Serve as a senior decision-maker and technical authority, driving alignment across global teams and stakeholders, setting engineering standards, and mentoring senior engineers through influence rather than direct line management. Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline is preferred. 15 years of experience in database engineering and/or operations, with significant depth in Microsoft SQL Server in large-scale, mission-critical environments. Demonstrated senior technical leadership as a key decision-maker driving architecture, st ... (truncated, view full listing at source)