Technical Solutions Architect – London, South East England
About this role:
About Aladdin & Aladdin Studio. ALADDIN® is our operating system for handling financial portfolios. It unites the information, people, and technology needed to manage money in real-time at every step of the investment process. Aladdin exists so that every financial professional can see, understand, and act with clarity. Aladdin combines sophisticated risk analytics with comprehensive portfolio management, trading, and operations tools on a single platform to power informed decision-making. The platform builds a connective tissue for thousands of users investing worldwide.
Aladdin Studio is a developer platform that is open to all users within an organization, from professional engineers building the latest workflow applications to data analysts creating automated reporting to the technically curious portfolio managers automating investment insights. Aladdin Studio allows for the differentiation and customization on top of Aladdin so that our clients can further build unique and value-generating workflows and tools by integrating with Aladdin programmatically.
The Role:
As a trusted customer advocate, the Vice President, Technical Solutions Architect for Aladdin Studio will help organizations build differentiated solutions on top of Aladdin. You will work with executives and end-users to drive best practices around Aladdin Studio by building a culture and community of citizen developers centred around Aladdin. By leveraging Studio’s advanced cloud-based solutions you will help our clients solve their most pressing challenges by analyzing existing workflows and unique problems and converting them to scalable workloads built on Aladdin Studio. You will have the opportunity to help shape and execute a financial development strategy to build mindshare and broad use of Aladdin Studio within our enterprise customers.
We are looking for a seasoned professional with a passion for enterprise data products specifically in and around asset management. Significant experience in making these solutions discoverable, usable, well-governed, and loved by users will drive success. You need to possess a deep understanding of solution architecting, a broad understanding of data warehousing concepts, technologies and use cases, empathy for data users, and an ability to shape and execute both a long-term vision and near-term incremental improvements for clients from portfolio managers to information technology teams.
Success in this role depends on your ability to quickly understand Aladdin data, the Studio technology stack and product strategy. Your passion for continually improving the user’s experience with data will be critical. You will monitor Aladdin Studio’s product roadmap, industry trends, and user feedback, and will translate these into opportunities for improvements to Aladdin Studio.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own enterprise client relationships with client technical lead to cultivating a culture built around Aladdin Studio
- Drive innovative solutions to clients on top of Aladdin Studio driving consumption and adoption of key capabilities
- Design, develop, and deploy solutions with clients and internal engineers that deliver value to client users in scalable and repeatable workflows
- Educate customers of all sizes on the value proposition of Aladdin Studio, and participate in deep architectural discussions to ensure solutions are designed for successful deployment on Aladdin Studio
- Capture and share best-practice knowledge among Aladdin Studio solutions architects and Implementations teams. Author or otherwise contribute to Aladdin Studio customer-facing publications such as whitepapers
- Build deep relationships with senior technical individuals within customers to enable them to be cloud advocates
- Act as a technical liaison between customers, service engineering teams and support
Desired Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in design/implementation/consulting experience with distributed applications in and around financial services
- Experience in investment accounting, investment operations, portfolio management, trading or risk management is a must
- 1+ years of experience in infrastructure architecture (networking, storage, compute) and/or database architecture is desired
- Familiarity with capital markets instruments (equities, fixed income, derivatives) or a solid understanding of the investment lifecycle or workflow expertise
- Working knowledge of data warehouse and data lake technologies and use cases, including on cloud-based platforms. A good understanding of software development tools and methodologies and an ability to adapt to new technologies and learn quickly
- Experience migrating or transforming legacy customer solutions to the cloud
- Professional experience architecting/operating solutions built on the cloud
- Strong analytical mindset and ability to use sound data and logic to make compelling decisions and recommendations
- Global Teamwork – the ability to work effectively as part of a geographically diverse team
- Excellent communication and orchestration skills both written and verbal, to navigate a matrixed organization, tell compelling stories with ease, and inspire a common vision
- History of successful technical sales consulting and architecture engagements with large-scale customers or enterprises
- Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort speaking with executives, IT Management, and developers.
- Technical degree; Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics background highly valued
- Experience using big data technologies such as AWS, Azure, Hadoop, and Snowflake is a significant plus
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.
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
