Meet BlackRock: Jobs, Networking & Tech Talks

Gassia Fox, Managing Director, is the Chief Operating Officer for the Aladdin Product Group. In this role, she oversees and coordinates strategic initiatives and the day-to-day management of APG globally. Prior to assuming her current role, she was responsible for the global platform and business strategy for BlackRock Investment Stewardship (BIS). In this capacity, she oversaw the daily operations and strategic initiatives for BIS across technology, internal and external communications, marketing and client engagement and reporting. She also spent time as the Chief Operating Officer of the combined BlackRock BIS and Global Public Policy (GPPG) groups, and was globally responsible for executing on the platform, business management, and operational processes needed across both functions.

Gassia was previously a member of Blackrock Platform Innovation (BPI) where she led large-scale cross-functional initiatives for the firm, including the integration of the Alternatives business onto Aladdin, automating FX hedging processes for Finance and re- engineering how the firm accesses Aladdin data.

Surbhi Arora, Director, is a member of Blackrock's Aladdin Product Group within the Portfolio Management Tools team. She is an Engineering Lead in the Shared Services Architecture team, responsible for solving the cross-cutting concerns in Portfolio Management. Surbhi specializes in the core architectural skills aligned with the strategy of Aladdin- API, Monitoring, Frameworks etc. and apply those across the spectrum of PM Tools.

Prior to joining APG in 2019, Surbhi has been part of Aladdin Wealth Tech for seven years, where she led the Development of some key projects and products successfully:

iShares.com- redefining iShares.com with launch of Comparison tool and Screener and helping bring consistency of architecture across BlackRock.com and iShares.com

iRetire- leading Client Implementations and Re-Platforming to reduce the go-to market for iRetire launch at the client side

Institutional Client Sites (now Gateway)- leading the way to move all the institutional clients off LBGI sites and most clients off X-sites to the ICS

Surbhi also led the development of Aladdin Client Sites, Cash Sites and Product Pages globally. Surbhi has been associated with BlackRock since 2012. She started as a tech lead in Gurgaon, India office, leading the development of North America iShares.

Alexandra Khosid, Managing Director, is a member of the Aladdin Product Group. She is part of the Portfolio Management Tools (PMT) team within the Aladdin Product Group. This team is responsible for many systems used to deliver scale and operational consistency to the investment teams in BlackRock as well as clients of the Black Rock Solutions.

Within PMT team, Alex leads a global team working on Portfolio Construction application. In this role, she works closely with BPI, PMG, BRS and other teams to deliver a cross-asset portfolio construction system designed to support a variety of investment workflows for over 3,000 portfolio managers.

Prior to taking on her current role in 2006, she was part of the Portfolio Management Risk Reporting team in BlackRock Solutions, working on developing Green Package software. In this role she helped build the next generation reporting based on XML files.

Prior to joining BlackRock in 2005, she held several software development positions building enterprise level applications in C++, Java and J2EE in reporting, networking and e-commerce areas.

Alex earned a BS degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, Russia and MS degree in Computer Science from New York University.

Jonelle Bowen, Associate, is a member of the User Experience (UX) Engineering team within APG. The UX Engineering team is responsible for developing and maintaining the Aladdin Design System.

Prior to joining the UX Engineering team, Jonelle completed the Graduate Analyst program, where she rotated on the Aladdin Quality Engineering (AEQ) team, the SRE Dev tools team, the Client Experience - Digital Client team and finally, the UX Engineering team.

She joined the firm with the Summer 2018 Graduate Analyst class, having graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a Bachelor's in Computer Science. In her free time, she enjoys playing video games, reading, drawing, and playing the piano.

Charlotte List, Associate, is a software engineer in the Risk and Investment Oversight team within the Aladdin Product Group. Charlotte focuses on Aladdin Research, and primarily works on screening and surveillance tools.

Before joining the RIO team, Charlotte completed the Graduate Analyst Rotational Program in APG from 2018 to 2020. During this time, Charlotte rotated across four development teams: DataOps Engineering Team in Technology and Enterprise Services, APG BOES Onboarding Systems (now ETF Engineering), APG Trading Systems, and Risk and Investment Oversight Team.

In addition to her current role as a software engineer, Charlotte is a Read Ahead mentor to a student at a local New York City public elementary school. She also mentors with BlackRock's partnership with Girls Who Code.

Charlotte graduated from Connecticut College with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics in May 2018. She was a member of the Varsity Sailing Team at Connecticut College.

Brett is a technical leader specializing in platform engineering, the practice of designing, building and operating platforms for Application Development teams to leverage. He was previously head of engineering at Future Advisor, which was acquired by BlackRock in 2015. Prior to this, he held roles at OPower, Vittana Foundation and Amazon.

His work at Future Advisor was transformational – rearchitecting the tech stack from a liability to a competitive advantage. More recently, Brett joined the Site Reliability Engineering team, and now co-leads the Kubernetes and Observability efforts central to re-platforming Aladdin for the future. This work is critical to the continued growth and success of Aladdin.