Vice President, Application Engineer

About This Role

At BlackRock, technology resilience and operational excellence are foundational. As a Vice President, Application Engineer with a strong Java engineering background, you will lead the reliability, automation, and production stability of mission-critical enterprise-scale software.

You will combine deep systems engineering, strong operational instincts, and hands-on automation expertise with the ability to understand and troubleshoot Java-based services & modern tech stack. This hybrid profile strengthens your capacity to drive end-to-end service ownership—runtime operations to incident leadership.

About Post Trade Accounting (PTA)

• A major strategic area within Aladdin and one of BlackRock’s largest engineering investments.
• Responsible for the systems that ensure accurate, scalable, and efficient accounting across global operations.
• Expanding into data analytics and pipeline initiatives using Snowflake, Redis, and Kafka to manage high-volume, real-time data.
• Collaborates closely with Product, Operations, and other Engineering teams to deliver business-critical capabilities.
• Agile and collaborative environment that values technical depth, quality, and innovation.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the senior owner for production stability and service reliability.
• Implement and refine monitoring, alerting, and observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, and OpenTelemetry.
• Ensure production readiness through capacity planning, change reviews, and disaster-recovery exercises.
• Drive long-term remediation by translating operational learnings into engineering backlog priorities.
• Influence service design toward operability, observability, and supportability.
• Lead major incident management, including triage, stakeholder communication, and root-cause analysis.
• Work closely with L1/L2/L3 support teams to define escalation paths, SLAs, and handover processes.
• Design and promote agentic automation solutions to reduce repetitive manual tasks across DevOps and Application Support workflows.
• Champion a shift from reactive support toward proactive, intelligent operations.
• Bridge gaps between Engineering and Operations through shared technical context.

Qualifications / Competencies

• B.S./M.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline.
• 8+ years of professional experience across DevOps, SRE, Product Engineering and/or Production Support roles.
• Strong knowledge of Java and Spring-based services, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Strong hands-on experience with observability and monitoring stacks.
• Exposure to AI-assisted tooling for operations, automation, or observability.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Proven incident leadership and calm decision-making under pressure.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to influence engineering and operations teams.
• Experience with Sybase, SQL Server, Snowflake, Cassandra, Redis, and Kafka is a plus.

Nice to Have

• Experience with service resiliency patterns or multi-region deployments.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, or cloud-native environments (AWS/GCP).
• Familiarity with financial systems, accounting, or investment technology.

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.

Key skills/competency

• Java Development
• DevOps Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Production Support
• Incident Management
• Observability & Monitoring
• Distributed Systems
• Automation Solutions
• Financial Technology (FinTech)
• Cloud-Native Platforms