BlackRock Investment Institute, Portfolio Research, Associate

About this role BlackRock is the world's largest and most prominent investment management firms, managing trillions of dollars in assets for institutions, governments, and individuals worldwide. We offer a wide range of investment products and services, including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and alternative investments, catering to various investor needs and risk appetites. BlackRock has embraced technology in its operations and investment strategies, utilizing advanced analytics, machine learning, and data-driven insights to enhance decision-making processes and optimize portfolio performance. 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.   Why is your role important? 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. What will you be doing? Core portfolio research 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. Private markets research 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. AI-enabled research transformation 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. What are we looking for?   Qualifications 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 softw