Python Financial Engineering Platform Lead, Vice President

About this role About Quantitative Analytics Engineering BlackRock is one of the world’s preeminent asset management firms and an outstanding provider of global investment management, risk management, and advisory services to institutional, intermediary and individual investors around the world. Besides offering a range of investment solutions — from fundamental and quantitative active management approaches to highly efficient indexing strategies – BlackRock also provides direct access to its market leading analytic models by onboarding clients to its Aladdin Platform, an end-to-end portfolio management software solution. The Investments and Trading Engineering (ITE) team builds and delivers Aladdin's industry-leading risk management, portfolio management, compliance and trading capabilities. Within ITE, Quantitative Analytics Engineering (QAE) is a global team of quantitative developers responsible for the implementation of security valuation, portfolio risk, liquidity and performance attribution models. BlackRock Portfolio managers and external Aladdin clients such as pension funds and insurance companies rely on models maintained by QAE to identify investment opportunities, build portfolios and manage risk. What will you be doing? Our diverse and distributed team has a keen interest and expertise in all things related to technology and financial analytics. We provide the technology platform that enables research, implementation, delivery and execution of financial risk models to our internal partners and external clients, and their integration with Aladdin. We are looking for self-motivated lead software engineer to spearhead the development of said platform. We maintain a set of Python libraries, both internal and soon-to-be open source, that allows modellers to research, implement and run financial risk models. We also maintain and advise our users on our Model SDLC that heavily relies on the Aladdin Engineering SDLC. To design, implement and maintain this platform, we are looking for an individual with experience and interest in Python library development, Azure DevOps, Apache Arrow and potentially Snowflake for data warehousing and computation. Our team is: Passionate about technology and solving complex problems. Develops in Python, working with technologies like Pandas, Apache Arrow, Snowflake, Prefect, Docker, and Azure DevOps. Comprised of technology leaders that unlock constant innovation. Constantly challenges the technology status quo and looks for ways to improve the platform. Key Responsibilities We expect the role to involve the following core responsibilities and would expect a successful candidate to be able to demonstrate skills or experience with the following (not in order of priority): Quickly learn the platform and act as a subject matter expert towards modelling teams. Lead platform development supporting both financial engineers and researchers. Facilitate technical design and code review sessions to ensure software meets functional and compatibility requirements, as well as high quality standards. Build widely used and reliable fundamental components as part of the platform, distributed as Python libraries. Build high quality software that improves the user experience of the downstream modeller and developer. Stay abreast of the latest developments in machine learning, quantitative finance, and technology to incorporate innovative solutions into our platform. Working with modellers to understand the business and their requirements. Help refactor and optimise the risk model code. Enhance the performance of existing models, ensuring they operate efficiently at scale. Implementation and maintenance of a standard data / technology deployment workflow to ensure that all deliverables/enhancements are delivered in a disciplined and robust manner. Ensure operational readiness of the product and meet customer commitments with regards to incident SLAs. Skil ... (truncated, view full listing at source)