Team Leader – Aladdin Interfaces recruitment

BlackRock is one of the world’s preeminent asset management firms and a premier provider of global investment management, risk management and advisory services to institutional, intermediary and individual investors around the world. BlackRock offers a range of solutions — from rigorous fundamental and quantitative active management approaches aimed at maximizing outperformance to highly efficient indexing strategies designed to gain broad exposure to the world’s capital markets. Our clients can access our investment solutions through a variety of product structures, including individual and institutional separate accounts, mutual funds and other pooled investment vehicles, and the industry-leading iShares® ETFs.

Job Purpose/Background:

This is a position working within the Aladdin and Technology division of BlackRock.  The position is as a Business Analyst in the London Office within the Aladdin Interfaces team (AI).

Aladdin®, BlackRock’s enterprise investment system, supports the entire investment management process, including risk analytics, portfolio management, compliance and operational processing, and is used by many large and sophisticated financial institutions.

The AI team is responsible for the receipt and provision of all data from and to Aladdin at BlackRock and external clients using Aladdin.  The AI group develops, maintains, deploys, and supports interfaces and tools to facilitate the exchange of data between Aladdin and other systems such as accounting systems, data warehouses, asset managers, custodians, fund accountants, etc. Standard inbound interfaces include trades from external trading systems, positions from custodians for reconciliation, client prices, subscriptions and redemptions, and in some cases risk.  Standard outbound interfaces include trading activity, security master, reference data, positions, prices, and market and economy data.  AI, on occasion, is also required to build and support bespoke interfaces for clients, and to do one-time take-ons of client data into Aladdin.

Key Responsibilities:

The primary responsibility of this position will be to support the implementation of interfaces in implementations where Aladdin is being installed in client sites.

Responsibilities include:

• Understanding business processes and how data flows between systems to support those processes.

• Defining and investigating alternative approaches to how data flows between systems in support of business processes.

• Understanding the technology, system capabilities, and operational processes so as to identify creative solutions that meet client needs.

• Configuring interfaces in Aladdin to send and receive data from client systems

• Gathering, understanding and documenting requirements from business users for new interface and application functionality.

• Assisting new clients in coordination of data conversion and parallel testing.

• Production support of all interfaces including those not directly worked on.

• Understanding BlackRock Solutions’ applications and their interdependency with Aladdin Interfaces.

• Ability to navigate UNIX and create and understand SQL in order to clarify business requirements, validate test results, and support and trouble shoot interface issues.

• Perform Business Process Requirement analysis and ensure comprehensive understanding of both the required technology and operational processes required to deploy successful solutions.

• During implementations, Aladdin interfaces may need to be enhanced or new interfaces may need to be built. For those, prepare technical specifications sufficient for programmers to understand, build, unit test, and deploy required interfaces and enhancements.

• Creation of test plans and detailed test cases.

• Preparation of release notes for developed functionality.

Knowledge/Experience:

• Candidate should have strong educational background and comprehensive experience in financial services operations, technology or finance unit. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience integrating financial systems; for example, working for a firm whose system gets installed in client environments and needs to integrate with client systems by sending and receiving data with the client systems. The candidate should have a strong working knowledge of data concepts such as ETL, ODS, XML, DTD, schema, data modeling, and data warehousing. Candidate should also have a proven track record of project management and experience working with clients. Strong written and verbal communications skills are essential.

Skills/Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree or equivalent in any of the following areas:  Accounting, Finance, Operations Management, Computer Science.

• Masters or CFA desirable.

Competencies:

• Networking and collaboration skills.

• The candidate will be required to initiate projects and work well with peers.

• Strong interpersonal skills, ability to work with business people, resolve conflicts, bring various functional groups together to successful resolution of contentious issues.

• Strong problem-solving ability.

• Attention to detail.

• A drive to constantly improve the process.

• Able to work independently as required.