AI Labs: Senior Backend and Cloud Engineer, Associate

Key Skills

Aartificial intelligence, API, AWS, Cloud computing, Design, Finance, Python Programming

Job Description

AI Labs: Senior Backend and Cloud Engineer

The AI Labs

Since our founding 30 years ago, BlackRock has brought together great minds to drive innovation. From the beginning, we have been leveraging technology for insight and efficiency to make our business better and to help clients realize the objectives they desire. In 2018 BlackRock accelerated innovation and technology again with additional investment in artificial intelligence and data science and all the potential they represent.

The AI Labs was formed to act as a central hub with a firm-wide remit to solve strategic business challenges for the firm by bringing to bear our expertise in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science and optimization. Our mission is to combine human and machine intelligence to revolutionize asset management.

We are a hybrid research and product team and have a responsibility to drive towards commercial impact in the form of alpha generation, operational efficiencies, and cost reduction. Building on the success of systematic investment teams with a history of leveraging machine learning at BlackRock to create alpha, the goal was to apply these same techniques throughout the business.

Job Description

As a backend and cloud engineer, you will sit on a product team developing products that are based on proprietary statistics, machine learning, optimization, and AI methods and that are of strategic importance to the firm. You will partner with our product managers, researchers, and stakeholder teams to develop application logic and infrastructure that facilitate the use of our models and analytics within a larger, integrated workflow. This includes implementing the methods being developed by the researchers in production grade code and enabling access via a variety of access patterns (APIs, files, libraries, etc.). You will support the deployment of the applications by designing and implementing the necessary cloud infrastructure. You will also be responsible for creating automated tests of all software developed, including unit and integration tests.

Responsibilities

• Develop backend application logic described in technical documentation produced by our researchers and architects.

• Develop any cloud infrastructure to support the deployment of the applications, including but not limited to, data storage and access, cloud compute, serverless deployments, and asynchronous batching.
• Test all code developed using robust unit tests and automated integration tests.

Qualifications

• A bachelors or masters in computer science or similar software engineering focused major.
• 5+ years of professional experience designing and implementing backend applications and cloud infrastructure.

• Proficiency in Python in the contexts of backend application development, automation, and infrastructure development. Knowledge of Python in the context of quantitative computing is a big plus.
• Proficiency in AWS in the contexts of infrastructure development and deployment of applications.
• Understanding of testing in the context of software engineering, including unit testing, integration testing, performance testing, etc.
• Background in finance will be looked upon favorably but is not a requirement.

Our benefits

To help you stay energized, engaged and inspired, we offer a wide range of employee benefits including: retirement investment and tools designed to help you in building a sound financial future; access to education reimbursement; comprehensive resources to support your physical health and emotional well-being; family support programs; 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.