About this role
Business Overview
Portfolio Management Group (PMG) Tech is the horizontal technology platform within BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group (PMG), built to integrate investment research with advanced engineering, AI, and alternative data; making technology a direct contributor to alpha generation across PMG.
It operates as one global team across three verticals - Platform Strategy, Research Solutions (DS&S), and Platform Change (IPT)
PMGTech centrally steers PMG’s AI strategy - building an AI‑ready research environment, unified data layer, agentic orchestration networks, and an investment focused application layer - deploying AI‑powered research solutions into production.
As a member of PMGTech, you will collaborate with investment researchers and portfolio managers to build and scale capabilities - spanning data engineering, GenAI, and platform tooling - with an objective towards streamlining research workflows and enabling differentiated alpha-generative investment insights across PMG’s investment pillars.
Role Overview
We envision the AI Lead Engineer role as an investor-facing technical partner role with deep AI, data, and systems expertise who designs and builds AI-powered research applications that integrate seamlessly into investor research workflows.
AI Lead Engineers will sit within DS&S pods - asset-class focused sub-teams - and collaborate directly with investors across Portfolio Management Group (PMG) to understand their business, map research workflows, identify opportunities for AI leverage, and translate them into intuitive, scalable, production–grade research applications.
AI Lead Engineers will own the technical vision, design, architecture, and product experience of specific research apps, partnering with Research Engineers, Engineering Hub and Platform to ensure these applications are robust, usable, and aligned with investor objectives.
Key Responsibilities
AI System Design & Architecture: Lead the architecture of AI‑powered research applications. Build scalable LLM features (RAG, agents, search) using enterprise data engines, orchestration, and secure/observable production practices with Engineering Hub and Platforms.
Investor‑Facing Research Partnership: Act as the technical partner to investors - translate open‑ended research questions into feasible product concepts. Embed AI, automation, and advanced analytics in workflows, and iterate quickly via prototypes and demos.
Application Development & Product Experience: Own the end‑to‑end user experience of investor facing research apps. Partner with full‑stack and research engineers to design intuitive UIs, prepare data, and integrate workflows so apps fit naturally into research processes.
AI Capability Development: Drive the lifecycle from POC to MVP to Production for AI applications. Evaluate and prototype emerging models/APIs (summarization, reasoning, search, classification, agents) and set best practices for prompts, safety, reliability, and testing - partnering with internal and external tech teams.
Delivery Excellence: Embed monitoring, observability, evaluations and data‑quality safeguards for GenAI powered research applications.
Qualifications
Required:
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI/ML, or equivalent.
6+ years of work experience delivering ML, AI, and data-intensive systems.
Hands-on experience building and deploying AI systems end-to-end - including LLM workflows, prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, entity extraction, embeddings/vector search, text2sql, fine-tuning, evaluation, and backend integration using Python and SQL.
Strong written and oral communication skills and ability to work directly with investors and senior partners.
Preferred:
Domain specific experience is a plus - building data-driven / research applications for investment research, investment management or financial services.
Hands-on experience with cloud platforms and enterprise AI infrastructure.
Having worked with open-source language models and keen interest in staying current with developments in the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape.
Understanding of investment strategies and asset classes is a plus.
Proficiency in front-end or full-stack development patterns for research apps.
Key Attributes
Deep curiosity about investment management and investment research.
Ability to translate business and research needs into technical solutions.
Technical leadership from concept to implementation.
Strong product intuition and user-centric thinking.
Ability to simplify complex AI systems into intuitive user experiences.
High standards for quality, reliability, and safety in AI systems.
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.