Applied AI & Data Science, Vice President

About this role
BlackRock’s Investment & Trading Compliance engineering organization is reimagining how compliance professionals interact with regulations, investment guidelines, and business processes through artificial intelligence.
We are seeking a Vice President, Applied AI & Data Science to help define and deliver the next generation of AI-powered compliance capabilities across the Aladdin platform. This role combines expertise in machine learning, generative AI, information retrieval, and software product development to create intelligent solutions that transform how compliance workflows are executed. The role also requires strong product engineering experience and the ability to apply modern, AI-enabled development practices to deliver production-grade solutions.
You will work closely with product managers, software engineers, compliance specialists, AI researchers, and business stakeholders to build and scale AI solutions that automate complex workflows, accelerate knowledge discovery, improve decision-making, and enhance operational efficiency across global compliance functions.
This is a highly impactful role focused on bringing emerging AI technologies into production and delivering measurable outcomes for clients and internal users.
About the team
The Investment & Trading Compliance engineering team develops technology that helps investment professionals and compliance teams manage regulatory obligations and investment restrictions across global markets.
Our mission is to leverage artificial intelligence to transform compliance from reactive processes into intelligent, proactive, and scalable experiences.
Key areas of focus include:
Agentic compliance workflows
AI-powered compliance assistants and copilots
Semantic search and knowledge retrieval
Large language models and reasoning systems
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Compliance knowledge graphs and rule intelligence
AI-driven workflow automation
Evaluation and governance of AI systems
Enterprise AI platforms within Aladdin
What You’ll Do
Drive AI Innovation
Lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI solutions that address complex compliance and regulatory challenges.
Identify opportunities where AI can transform existing processes and unlock new capabilities for compliance professionals.
Shape the long-term AI strategy and roadmap for Investment & Trading Compliance.
Build Intelligent AI Systems
Design and implement solutions leveraging large language models, agentic frameworks, retrieval systems, and enterprise knowledge platforms.
Develop approaches for semantic search, intelligent document retrieval, workflow orchestration, and reasoning over compliance knowledge.
Partner with engineering teams to deliver highly scalable, production-grade AI services.
Apply modern product engineering practices across the software and product development lifecycle, including the use of AI to accelerate design exploration, prototyping, implementation, testing, code review, and documentation.
Articulate architectural trade-offs and design options, including their impact on scalability, resilience, cost, and delivery velocity.
Advance Applied AI Research
Evaluate emerging trends and technologies across generative AI, agentic architectures, retrieval systems, and foundation models.
Establish experimentation frameworks to validate new approaches and technologies.
Collaborate with internal AI research teams to translate innovative concepts into real-world business solutions.
Own AI Quality and Governance
Define evaluation methodologies, success metrics, benchmarking strategies, and monitoring frameworks for AI solutions.
Drive continuous improvement through model evaluation, user feedback, and operational telemetry.
Ensure AI solutions meet BlackRock standards for responsible AI, transparency, security, and reliability.
Partner Across the Firm
Collaborate with engineering, product, legal, compliance, and AI platform teams to deliver business value through AI.
Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Influence senior stakeholders and drive alignment across multiple organizations.
Mentor and Lead
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software engineers.
Promote best practices in experimentation, evaluation, AI engineering, and product development.
Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.
About you
Advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline.
Significant experience developing and deploying machine learning or AI solutions in production environments.
Demonstrated expertise applying data science and AI techniques to solve complex business problems.
Strong programming skills in Python and experience working within modern software development environments.
Experience partnering with software engineering teams to operationalize AI solutions at enterprise scale.
Experience applying modern product engineering practices to deliver scalable, production-grade solutions.
Familiarity with AI-enabled SDLC and PDLC practices, including specification-driven development, AI-assisted development, testing, code review, and documentation.
Experience with modern AI development tools such as Devin, Windsurf, Claude Code, or similar.
Ability to articulate architectural trade-offs and design options, including impacts on scalability, resilience, cost, and delivery velocity.
Familiarity with API design principles, event-driven architecture, and quality practices such as test-driven and behavior-driven development.
Ability to influence technical strategy and drive initiatives across organizational boundaries.
Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred
Experience with large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and agentic AI systems.
Experience building semantic search, retrieval, recommendation, or knowledge discovery platforms.
Familiarity with embeddings, vector search, ranking systems, and information retrieval methodologies.
Experience establishing AI evaluation frameworks and model quality metrics.
Understanding of AI governance, model risk management, and responsible AI principles.
Experience in financial services, regulatory technology, compliance technology, or enterprise SaaS platforms.
Experience with cloud-native AI architectures and modern ML platforms.
Technologies We Use
Examples of technologies and platforms used by the team include:
Python
SQL
Azure AI Services
OpenAI and enterprise foundation models
Retrieval and search platforms
Embedding and vector search technologies
Machine learning frameworks
Knowledge management systems
Distributed cloud platforms
Observability and AI evaluation tooling
API and event-driven architectures
AI-assisted software development tools
Automated testing and continuous delivery practices
Our Impact
Our team is building the foundation for the future of compliance technology at BlackRock. We are creating intelligent systems that help users search vast compliance knowledge bases, automate complex workflows, reason across regulations and investment restrictions, and deliver AI-powered experiences directly within Aladdin.
The successful candidate will play a critical role in defining how AI transforms compliance operations for BlackRock and our clients globally.
Our benefits
To help you stay energized, engaged and inspired, we