So the fun thing about this one is… huge problems to explore and massive resources to use on them. Startup culture linked to a rock-solid parent organization.

Data Science At BlackRock

In February 2018, BlackRock announced the creation of a new central Data Science team in order to accelerate innovation and technology in artificial intelligence, and to have firm-wide impact using data science to solve strategic problems. The team is led by two experienced data science leaders, Dr. Sherry Marcus and Dr. Rachel Schutt.

BlackRock manages $6.2+ trillion in assets on behalf of investors worldwide. As such, there is a rich problem space for data scientists and engineers across all areas of the business including investments, sales, marketing, operations, product, UX, etc. and the potential to have large scale impact.

The Kinds Of Problems You’d Be Working On

• Building a dynamic pricing and auto-bidding engine for the security lending business
• Alpha generation: extracting signals from alternative data sets that provide investment opportunities to investors.
• Predictive models in sales and marketing applications in order to anticipate client behavior and needs.
• Natural language processing in order to extract and correlate n-grams from unstructured text including from financial reports, news, and contracts in order to drive contextual understanding in different business applications across the firm.
• Speech-to-text analysis
• Graph Analysis for path generation for data lineage/provenance, ontological development, or network analytics.
• Automating repeatable tasks done by humans to free them up to work on the tasks that require their human intelligence
• The firm-wide policy on algorithmic accountability and ethics of data science

The Team You’d Be Part Of

In the first year, the team will grow to 20 data scientists and data engineers. The team works collaboratively; and is a multi-disciplinary team with the following skills and capabilities: machine learning, statistical modeling, exploratory data analysis, natural language processing, data visualization, network/graph modeling, ETL, data pipelines, data architecture, communication, project /product management and strategy. We work with data from a wide variety of sources including text, news feeds, financial reports, time series transactions, user behavior logs, imagery, and real-time data.

We will be hiring a mix of tech leads and individual contributors with deep expertise in certain areas, as well as generalists. All individuals will be expected to have solid statistical/mathematical, and/or algorithmic/computational foundation and writing code is required. Each individual will be expected to contribute and lead based on their experience and expertise.

As this is a new team, we will be in start-up mode, so you would be helping to build and shape the team and culture from the ground up. You should therefore be comfortable with ambiguity and willing to be pro-active in your contributions, and evolve as the team grows.

We are looking for candidates with unique backgrounds and diverse skillsets with fresh perspectives to accelerate and amplify our efforts to make an impact at BlackRock. Data Science Core aims to bring best of class technologies, analytics, and insights to the entirety of the firm and to our clients utilizing data from a wide variety of sources including text, news feeds, financial reports, time series transactions, logs, imagery, and real-time data.

Position Details on their website.

BlackRock – Data Scientist / Data Science Core – NYC