Director, Platform Engineering

ENGINEERINGUK; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job description

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Sector: Engineering
Role: Director
Contract Type: Permanent
Hours: Full Time

About this role
BlackRock Company Overview:
BlackRock is a global leader in investment management, risk management, and advisory services for institutional and retail clients. We help clients achieve their goals and overcome challenges with a range of products, including separate accounts, mutual funds, iShares (exchange-traded funds), and other pooled investment vehicles. We also offer risk management, advisory, and enterprise investment system services to a broad base of institutional investors through BlackRock Solutions. Headquartered in New York City, as of February 5, 2025, we handle approximately $11.5 trillion in assets under management (AUM) and have around 19,000 employees in offices across 38 countries, with a significant presence in key global markets, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Aladdin Data:
The Aladdin Data team maintains a pioneering data platform that delivers high-quality data to users, including investors, operations staff, data scientists, and engineers. Our aim is to provide consistent, high-quality data while evolving our platform to support the firm's growth. We build high-performance data pipelines, enable data discovery and consumption, and continually enhance our data storage capabilities.

We are looking for a SRE lead for Aladdin Data to architect, build and maintain resilient high scale systems - leveraging your engineering and rigorous problem-solving skills to address interesting and complex problems.

You are an ambitious engineer that can direct a global tight-knit engineering team, acting as a collaborative influencer to drive technical solutions and to be able to communicate those ideas to senior leaders. This is a hands-on role where you will be actively leading the implementation of engineering initiatives.

Role Responsibilities

• Take ownership of project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables using Agile methodologies.
• Understand and refine business and functional requirements.
• Significantly contribute to the resiliency of the Aladdin Data platform.
• Hands-on approach to getting work done; this will be a role that requires a 'roll your sleeves' up mentality.
• Be a leader with vision and a partner in brainstorming solutions for team productivity and efficiency, guiding and motivating others.
• Drive priority setting of the engineering team.
• Improve Engineering culture by encouraging continuous focus on reliability across the entire application lifecycle.
• Proactive participant in architectural and design decisions.
• Design and implement end-to-end monitoring solutions for Application and Infrastructure components, based on cutting-edge SLO-based telemetry tools.
• Drive the engineering of capacity management and demand forecasting solutions.
• Act as a culture carrier and leader, passing on SRE knowledge and best practices to the engineering team.
• Drive detailed root cause investigations for production incidents with rigorous focus on issue avoidance.
• Create/coordinate retros for significant incidents.
• Additional core engineering functions, such as adding custom Telemetry metrics to the code base of in-scope Applications.
• Anticipate new opportunities to continuously evolve the resiliency profile of scoped Applications and Infrastructure.

Skills/Qualifications
Must Have

• B.S. / M.S. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline with 5 - 8 years of experience.
• Experience leading high-performing customer success teams, and a track record of driving continuous improvement.
• Experience with troubleshooting performance issues.
• A passion for providing engineering support for highly available, performant full stack applications with a 'Student of Technology' attitude.
• Experience with relational database and NoSQL Database (e.g. Redis, Apache Cassandra).
• Exposure to cloud ecosystems such as AWS or Azure.
• Experience with CI/CD practices.
• Passion to work in a team environment, multi-tasking, and effective communication skills.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and debugging skills.
• Demonstrated ability to build positive relationships.
• Self-motivated.
• Knowledge of software development methodologies (analysis, design, development, testing) and basic understanding of Agile / Scrum methodology and practices.
• Good hands-on object-oriented programming experience in Java, including proficiency in object-oriented principles and design patterns.

Good to Have

• Passionate about data platforms, data quality, and everything data.
• Understanding of Agile work environments, including knowledge of GIT, CI/CD, and one scripting language like Perl, Python, etc.
• Experience with automated configuration management tools.

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.

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.

BlackRock is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, disability, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and other protected characteristics at law.