Announcing 7 New Tech Fellows at BlackRock
Growing BlackRock’s Tech Fellow program with new leadership
By: Lance Braunstein, Head of the Aladdin Product Group
Technology not only serves as the foundation of BlackRock’s business but defines a significant part of how we work. Today, we’re spotlighting the people who apply their vast technical expertise to solving the firm’s toughest technological challenges — BlackRock’s newest Tech Fellows.
The BlackRock Tech Fellows are a cohort of the firm’s most impactful and visionary technologists, working together to foster a culture of engineering excellence and innovation, and making BlackRock the career destination of choice for building world-class financial technology. Being named a BlackRock Tech Fellow is a recognition of a superb record of technology experience, achievement, and leadership, and represents a significant career milestone.
The title of Tech Fellow also brings a responsibility to attract, inspire, develop, and promote the next generation of outstanding tech talent at BlackRock. Many of the tech fellows are also the engineers, architects and designers for Aladdin, BlackRock’s tech platform that unifies the investment management process. Tech Fellows are key drivers of the firm’s vibrant tech culture, including sponsoring this Engineering Blog, the annual Hackathon, and coding competitions. The Tech Fellows are also key architects of the tech career ladder framework, already in use by thousands of engineers at BlackRock to advance their careers.
The process of identifying and selecting new Tech Fellows is done annually and involves a significant investment of time, care, and diligence. Today, we’re celebrating the next class of seven new BlackRock Tech Fellows:
Andrew Whyte, Director, Head of Alpha Research Technology, Systematic Fixed Income
Andrew is a Python evangelist. His varied experience as an investor and scientist as well as his technical knowledge of architecture design, high-performance computing, modern data science and mathematics help him inject technical strategy across business needs.
Within Systematic Fixed Income, Andrew’s focus is on keeping the firm’s investment research capabilities at the forefront of the quantitative investment space. Before joining BlackRock in 2015, Andrew was a Senior Researcher at BH-DG Systematic Trading and London Diversified Fund Management. Andrew has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University.
Drew Rothstein, Managing Director, DevOps Engineering Lead
Drew is a technical expert of the highest level with broad and deep knowledge of applying technology to solve BlackRock’s scale challenges. He is a Cloud Native and Kubernetes expert, with specialized expertise across several cloud-native technologies and broad influence across the technical community.
Gaurav Krishna, Director, Financial Modeling Group
Gaurav is a hands-on technologist with expertise in financial modeling. He is responsible for promoting new architecture and design practices in partnership with Aladdin teams spanning several initiatives.
He actively works to promote technical excellence across India. Before joining BlackRock in 2016, Gaurav held engineering and quant roles at Barclays Capital, Indea Capital and Royal Bank of Scotland.
Sitija Sarkar, Managing Director, Head of Aladdin User Experience
Sitija has extensive expertise in developing web frameworks to transform a product’s user experience and visual output. She is an expert in modern web technologies and played a pivotal role in setting up Micro Frontend architecture.
Sitija is also an amplifier within the web community at BlackRock, promoting and encouraging best practices, high-quality outcomes and the role of technologists in the product process. Before joining BlackRock in 2012, Sitija held engineering roles at Sapient and Xerox, and has a degree in Computer Science.
Tayo Ibikunle, Managing Director, Global Head of BlackRock Enterprise Architecture
Tayo has extensive expertise in designing and engineering highly scaled and distributed applications and large-scale data footprints, transforming architectural practices and guiding organizations toward domain-driven design methodologies. As the Global Head of Enterprise Architecture for Aladdin, Tayo and his team partner with our most technical talent to provide the appropriate architectural guidance and standards for sustainably delivering world-class capabilities for clients.
He has degrees in Electrical Engineering: A PhD and an MSc from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, UK; and a BSc from the University of Obafemi Awolowo in Ife, Nigeria. He also currently holds 10 U.S. patents.
Vladimir Zakharov, Managing Director, Lead Architect for Aladdin Post Trade and Accounting
Vlad is a Technical Architect with expertise in architecture, design and implementation of scalable and sustainable applications and platforms. He brings insight and energy to large complex technical projects, is a deep Java subject matter expert, and can work across the entire technology stack.
Before joining BlackRock in 2020, Vlad held roles in both engineering and leadership at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and IBM. Vlad was a member of the Expert Group for JSR 335 (Lambda Expressions for the Java Programming Language)
Will Chen, Director, Aladdin Wealth Platform Engineering Lead
Will is a unique example at BlackRock of someone with deep expertise across multiple technical disciplines (Java/Scala, distributed computing, optimization) and extensive knowledge of portfolio and security analytics. He is responsible for pioneering major technological scale advancements within the Aladdin Wealth product suite that have also benefited and advanced the overall capabilities of Aladdin.
Will started his career at BlackRock as a program analyst in the Portfolio Analytics Group. He has degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science.
Learn more about technology careers at BlackRock.
