Associate , Electronic Trading Software Engineer (Java/C++/Python)

BlackRock Global Markets (BGM) group was created to advance our investment processes and platform architecture and ensure we most efficiently engage with other market participants in a collaborative, strategic way. Within BGM, BlackRock’s Global Trading organization operates with the goals of enhancing trading standards across asset classes, streamlining, and leveraging counter-party relationships, attracting, and retaining top trading talent in the industry, and developing a One BlackRock culture around trading activities. Partnering with portfolio management and regional leadership teams, Global Trading strives to deliver benefits of scale, enhance processes and transparency, improve trading performance, and drive innovation to provide tangible benefits to our clients, investment professionals and shareholders. 

As one of the largest asset managers, BlackRock needs to be careful about how it enters and exits investments. BlackRock also needs to increase electronic trading adoption and have tools to handle the increasing volume, complexity and liquidity demands of our trades optimally. BlackRock’s answer to this problem is its unique eTrading team and its implementation of electronic trading strategies. We are seeking a new member to join the eTrading team to help support and improve our electronic trading application and to continue to develop innovative tools for our traders. We use a highly customized version of a third-party vendor product to implement trading signals and strategies for the Equity, Futures, Options and FX trading teams. We are looking to expand across additional asset classes and the depth of our analytics. This is a high-profile group where we can directly support growth and impact the performance of our funds by providing tools for traders to make better trading decisions and strategies. The job requires a strong technical background and a basic understanding of financial markets. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Work with global teams to design, develop, test and maintain solutions. Solutions include but not limited to improving trading workflows, generating/integrating historical real-time data-driven insights and reducing trading operating risks. 

• Collaborate with traders to improve trading ecosystem by coming up with creative ideas and discussing new feature requests, issues and resolution  

• Provide regular updates to team’s project managers and/or stakeholders such as traders  

• Provide real-time support for our real time trading platform for equities, futures, options and FX  

• Maintain our existing platform and solutions such as version upgrades, migration and business continuity planning exercise. 

• Design and develop innovative solutions to improve support, testing and development effort 

Qualifications, Skills and Attributes 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field and 3+ years of equivalent experience 

• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, programming languages, distributed systems & information retrieval 

• Proficiency with object-oriented and/or functional programming languages such as Java/C++/Python/Scala 

• Proven understanding in Linux/Unix, Perl, Shell Scripting and databases 

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills 

• Experience working with “big data” environments a plus 

• Experience building stream-based analytics using as Spark or Kafka Streaming a plus 

• Experience with FIX protocol desirable 

• Basic understanding of financial markets for FX, Equities, Futures, Options & Fixed Income a plus