BlackRock Investment Institute, Portfolio Research, Associate

BlackRock•New York, NY

9d•$116,000 - $155,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The BlackRock Investment Institute (BII) leverages BlackRock's expertise and produces proprietary research to provide insights on the global economy, markets, geopolitics, and long-term asset allocation - all to help clients and portfolio managers navigate financial markets. We systematically leverage BlackRock’s expertise in markets, asset classes, and client segments to help our portfolio managers deliver positive investment results for clients. Our focus is to keep our investment professionals connected, informed, and on the cutting edge of investment thinking. BII research crafts the portfolio building blocks core to BlackRock’s mission to build a better financial future for its clients. By bringing together the best macro and market perspectives with cutting-edge portfolio construction techniques, BII distils what a complex world means for allocating investments. The candidate will be responsible for conducting research across asset classes and portfolio construction, including building and maintaining our industry-leading Capital Market Assumptions. This role spans a wide set of research domains, encompassing the integration of public and private markets, the development of advanced projection frameworks, and the use of AI-enabled tools to enhance the scale, quality and repeatability of research workflows. The role will have a particular focus on strengthening BII’s private markets research capability, including how private assets are modelled, projected, compared with public markets and incorporated into whole-portfolio asset allocation frameworks. The role will also help shape how AI is embedded into the research process itself, combining investment judgement, quantitative modelling and agentic workflows to make portfolio research more dynamic, repeatable and scalable without compromising analytical rigor. Working closely with portfolio managers, private markets specialists, researchers, technology partners and other stakeholders, you will translate this research into investable solutions and help reimagine how proprietary research IP can be converted into agentic workflows, decision-support tools and scalable analytical processes. As such, your research will underpin asset allocations over strategic horizons that give BlackRock’s clients the whole-portfolio perspective that they need today, while helping the Portfolio Research Group build a more AI-forward research platform for the future.

Requirements

A demonstrably quantitative and creative mind, with a degree in a quantitative field, such as economics, finance, engineering, physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science or a related discipline.
Hands-on experience with GenAI tools, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt orchestration, agentic workflows, evaluation frameworks and workflow automation.
Practical understanding of software development principles, including modular design, version control, testing, documentation, deployment and maintainability.
Strong understanding of the use of computer technology in financial and economic research, with strong programming skills, for example in Python, R or related statistical packages.
Strong statistical modelling and data analysis skills, with experience applying quantitative techniques to financial markets, asset pricing, portfolio construction or private markets research.
Strong communication skills and ability to distil research for broad consumption.
Open-minded thought process and intellectual curiosity.
Intuition for, and a passion for, financial markets, with experience in the finance sector or a strong interest in investment research.
Familiarity with private markets, alternative assets or illiquid asset classes, including areas such as private equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, liquidity modelling, cash-flow modelling or manager dispersion.
Motivated team player, flexible in approach and able to work independently.
Responsive with keen attention to detail.

Responsibilities

Generating BlackRock’s industry-leading, climate-aware Capital Market Assumptions, including the development of new quantitative models to project asset returns through time.
Building our next-generation macroeconomic and asset pricing stochastic simulation framework, playing a central role in its research and development.
Designing improved asset allocation processes with analytics that enhance portfolio construction and support clients’ long-term investment objectives.
Participating in global client engagement and contributing to internal and external stakeholder communications, particularly around strategic asset allocation, private markets and whole-portfolio construction.
Developing and enhancing private markets capital market assumptions across asset classes such as private equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure and other alternative assets.
Building analytical frameworks to compare public and private market opportunities on a consistent basis, including expected return, risk, liquidity, valuation, drawdown, cash-flow and implementation considerations.
Developing, applying and analyzing quantitative models for private markets, portfolio optimization and whole-portfolio construction.
Partnering directly with Portfolio Research Group subject-matter experts to translate proprietary research IP, models and recurring analytical processes into AI-enabled workflows, tools and decision-support systems.
Reimagining research workflows, moving beyond automation to redesign how portfolio research is generated, updated, governed, scaled and delivered to internal and external stakeholders.
Designing, prototyping and deploying AI-powered tools, copilots and agentic systems that support capital market assumptions, strategic asset allocation, portfolio construction, stochastic simulation, private markets research and client-facing investment insights.
Applying AI and data-driven tools to improve the scalability and consistency of private markets research, including data ingestion, document analysis, benchmarking, scenario analysis and repeatable investment diagnostics.
Building human-in-the-loop AI research workflows that combine data, models, retrieval systems, analytical code and narrative generation into governed, repeatable processes for producing portfolio insights.