Associate, Sustainability Analytics

Description

About this role

The Aladdin Financial Engineering business is responsible for all analytics technology across the Aladdin platform. We research, develop, and implement state-of-the-art quantitative models used to assess financial risk including climate risk across fixed income, equities, derivatives, and alternative products.

There are three groups within Analytics & Modeling - the Financial Modeling Group (“FMG”), Aladdin Sustainability Analytics and Core Analytic Solutions. The Aladdin Sustainability Analytics (ASA) is responsible for building products and capabilities that are needed to quantify the impact of climate risk and other sustainability factors on financial assets. We also develop and maintain climate data & model infrastructure used for production of analytics. Given the diversity of skills required to develop these products, the Sustainability analytics brings together modelers, quantitative developers, climate scientists, sector experts and climate researchers. As a member of ASA, you will be working with clients and partners to develop state of the art financial and economic models to assess the financial impacts of climate change and related policies on different asset classes - corporate equity, corporate bonds, mortgages, municipal bonds, sovereign debt and alternative instruments. As climate risk and sustainable investing become an ever-increasing focus for investors, you will be developing models and analytics to help drive a deeper understanding of risks and opportunities in this space. We use expertise of our researchers and quant engineers, along with the collective intelligence of our partners across BlackRock and client community, to deliver quantitative solutions and insights to help analyze investments and manage risk.

Job Purpose/Background:
Aladdin Sustainability Analytics (ASA) is looking for Climate Quant Researcher to join their Transition Data & analytics team. The primary job responsibilities include research and development of “language models” including large language model to capture and extract unstructured climate data from public sources & reports and build out of quantitative/ML based components for climate transition risk, decarbonization & temperature alignment suite of models.

Familiarity with following areas is essential:

- Natural language processing solutions on financial / climate datasets
- Language models like transformers, BERT etc.
- Large language models and underlying transformer/attention architecture

Key Responsibilities:

- Conduct research into emerging sector specific trends / technologies that will impact the transition and understand key data points suitable for models
- Act as an expert on large language models/ Natural language processing of financial & climate data
- Support the development of Blackrock’s Transition risk models for corporates in partnership with sector experts, and modelers across teams
- Support internal validation process through benchmarking analysis / research, user engagement and comprehensive documentation of models
- Additional responsibilities include working on techniques for synthetic data generation, outlier detection etc.

Skills & Qualifications:

- Bachelor or master’s level education with a focus on statistics, mathematics, engineering, climate science, or economics
- 3+ years of experience in building natural language processing solutions for challenging real world financial data
- Project experience with the modern Transformer/Attention architecture for text summarization, vectorization, entity extraction and reasoning
- Experience with emerging LLM products from Open AI, Google, and other industry leaders
- Experience in python & related framework/libraries needed for NLP/LLM’s, knowledge of algebraic modelling languages
- Experience with advanced statistical modeling for outlier detection, estimation of missing data, generation of synthetic data
- Understanding of climate/ESG vendors, climate datasets and standards, preferably on transition plans, commitment datasets, business plans, climate scenario etc. is desirable.
- Experience in various modelling techniques such as balance sheet modeling, econometrics / statistical analysis, mathematical optimization, is desirable
- Strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and the ability to work as part of a team in a fast-paced environment
- Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills

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