Meet Sue Zheng, BlackRock Tech Fellow and Lead Engineer for Aladdin Trading
Tags: Trading, Trading System, Engineering Career, Mentorship, Tech Fellows

Sue Zheng, BlackRock Tech Fellow and Lead Engineer for Aladdin Trading talks about her experience as an engineer innovating the Aladdin platform over the last 20 years.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of BlackRock delivering Aladdin externally to clients, and you’ve been around since the beginning. Did you ever think you’d be at the same company for that amount of time?

When I started, BlackRock was a small shop doing fixed income only. 20 years ago, Aladdin, BlackRock’s investment management technology used both internally and delivered externally to other financial institutions, looked very different. Back then, I thought I’d probably work here for five years or so and then move on. The thing is, BlackRock innovates so much and so often that it feels like a new company every five years. New challenges are always popping up and we’re constantly finding new ways to meet client needs. We’re still pioneering in the field and in that way, it still feels fresh.

How are you pioneering today?

The Aladdin platform has offered cutting edge technology to traders for years. As the engineering lead for Aladdin Trading, I’m responsible for the transformation that allows traders to seamlessly scale up to support record volume and growing complexity. The resilience and stability of our centralized platform was crucial for traders at BlackRock and traders at our Aladdin clients to successfully work remotely during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Our latest focus includes Automated Order Routing (AOR) that allows traders to script sophisticated rules to create automation and free themselves up to focus on more difficult to trade orders. This also promotes the “citizen developer” movement, providing users the ability to self-service through code.

What do you like about working on Aladdin?

Aladdin is truly a multi-asset platform technology. When designing a solution, we must be thoughtful about extending it to cover multiple asset classes while still catering to asset class specific nuances at the same time. It’s an interesting balancing act and it’s part of BlackRock’s DNA. We like to challenge ourselves in thinking beyond original requirements to come up with a holistic solution that benefits the broader community. It’s great to see my work scale in that way.

As an engineer, what made you choose BlackRock?

I studied computer science and economics in college, so working at BlackRock was at the intersection of both those interests. What I liked about BlackRock from the beginning was that I was really encouraged to try different things and to get into the mind of the user. If there is a requirement, we don’t just build to the requirement, we must think about what problem that requirement was designed to solve. And if we can find a better way to solve that problem, we have the freedom to try it.

From the beginning, I noticed that by putting myself in the shoes of the users of Aladdin, I’m able to understand the problem better and be more confident in my solution. Sometimes that allows me to see problems and opportunities before users even report them. For example, one of my very first projects as a software engineering analyst at BlackRock was to build a generic search tool across the various Aladdin data sets. In testing the tool, I found that it was extremely cumbersome to navigate a large result set. So even though it was not part of the spec, I did some research and figured out how to add a floating header and dynamic aggregation to the result set so that I would have a better user experience when I used the tool myself. That was when I began to learn to bring empathy into the design process, which is a fundamental pillar of engineering at BlackRock.

What does it mean to be a Tech Fellow?

I have been an engineer at BlackRock my whole career, so the designation and recognition as a Tech Fellow is an honor and a responsibility. The title was awarded to 13 technical leaders at BlackRock earlier this year for our expertise, leadership, and mentorship of engineers. A key responsibility for a Tech Fellow is commitment to technical excellence while driving tangible outcomes. As I noted above, BlackRock continues to innovate in the financial services industry and this Tech Fellow cohort provides technical vision and leadership for our ongoing transformation as a leader in financial services technology.

In addition to our contribution as technical leaders at BlackRock, this group also continues to mentor technical talent across the firm and promote our strong culture of engineering.

What do you look forward to with your career building Aladdin?

We’ve done an incredible amount of innovation for clients over the past twenty years, but there are many opportunities in front of us to do even more. I’m involved in some exciting initiatives that will truly transform our industry, including the Aladdin Whole Portfolio view that combines public market and private market investing, increased adoption of automation through our AOR tools, re-architecting of our core trading platform. I’m looking forward to continuing our push to be the industry leading multi-asset platform and to pass along my experience to our engineering community.