DevOps Architect

Agentic AI & Data Platform Architecture, BlackRock Global Markets, Director

About this role

Overview

BlackRock Inc. (NYSE: BLK) is the world’s largest asset manager. Within BlackRock, the BlackRock Global Markets (BGM) group provides the firm’s investment teams with access to markets, liquidity, financing, and additional sources of return across index equity, fixed income, trading, and lending. Within BGM, the Platform – Data & Analytics team builds and operates the data, analytics, and AI platforms that underpin these businesses — the engineering foundation for how BGM creates, delivers, and governs intelligence. In India, BlackRock operates from Gurgaon, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, offering a flexible hybrid work model, modern office environments, and a comprehensive benefits package supporting long‑term growth and well‑being.

Role Summary

We are seeking a Director‑level platform leader to own the technical architecture and build plan for BGM’s AI‑native, agentic data platform, designed around a deliberate dual‑lane architecture:

• Analytics Lane (Enterprise Data Platform / Snowflake) — governed analytical serving, certified data, and broad consumption.

• AI & Agentic Execution Lane — feature engineering, embeddings, vector workflows, model training and inference, agentic systems, and closed‑loop production feedback.

This role owns the end‑to‑end technical blueprint for the AI and agentic lane, including clean integration with the analytics lane and with BGM’s broader platform ecosystem — Aladdin Data and the Enterprise AI Platform (RockAI). Rather than assuming a single vendor stack, the role requires strong technical judgement to determine where to build internally, where to adopt external technologies, and how to assemble these into a cohesive system.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership and team‑building role: the successful candidate will establish and grow a platform engineering function in India.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & System Design

• Define and evolve the target architecture spanning ingestion, streaming, storage, feature and embedding pipelines, model and agent execution, and production inference.

• Establish clear workload and lifecycle boundaries between analytics consumption, experimentation, agentic workflows, and downstream integration.

• Make deliberate build‑vs‑leverage decisions across internal platforms and external technologies, designing clean integration contracts between components.

• Treat data, features, embeddings, models, and agents as first‑class artefacts with defined ownership, lifecycle states, and promotion semantics.

Design for Autonomy

• Design the platform so that progressive automation is an architectural property. Systems should support graduated autonomy — from human‑executed to fully autonomous — governed by trust and evidence.

• Ensure the platform enables structured assessment of which workflows are ready for automation, based on repeatability, judgement requirements, and operational complexity.

Stewardship, Partnership & Team Building

• Provide architectural stewardship through design reviews, mentoring, and continuous evolution of platform standards.

• Partner with BGM’s data governance leadership (based in San Francisco, NYC, LON) to embed governance architecturally — through metadata, lifecycle controls, and platform defaults.

• Build and lead a high‑performing platform engineering team in India. This is a greenfield function. Work closely with the Automation & Reliability Lead to ensure architecture decisions are operationally viable.

Success Measures

• A clear, adopted target architecture that materially reduces bespoke builds and platform fragmentation.

• Teams can progress from raw data to agentic workflows and production execution using standard, governed patterns.

• The platform demonstrably enables progressive automation — with automation readiness as a design property, not a retrofit.

Qualifications

Required

• 15+ years in backend, data, or platform engineering, with deep expertise designing and building distributed systems at scale. 8+ years in technical leadership roles.

• Strong grounding in modern data and compute technologies (e.g., Spark, streaming platforms, orchestration frameworks, lakehouse‑style architectures).

• Proven experience building platforms from heterogeneous components — not just operating single‑vendor environments.

• Strong engineering fundamentals (Python, SQL, system design, data modelling) and a commitment to engineering quality.

• Demonstrated ability to build, lead, and mentor senior engineering teams with strong communication across technical and executive stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience with AI‑native platforms in production (feature stores, model registries, vector databases, inference serving).

• Experience integrating internal and external platforms in regulated or complex enterprise environments.

• Financial services experience. A practical, innovative mindset with the confidence to make trade‑offs and the humility to revisit them.

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.

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.

For additional information on BlackRock, please visit @blackrock | Twitter: @blackrock | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/blackrock

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

Experience Level

Senior Level