AI and Security Architect, Director

About this role

As a member of BlackRock’s Cyber Architecture and Engineering organization, the Director, AI and Security Architecture will define and advance security strategy for AI-enabled systems across internal enterprise platforms and client-facing products. The scope includes LLM-powered applications, agent-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, tool-driven integrations, and distributed cloud-native platforms.

The role combines deep technical expertise with cross-functional leadership. The Director will lead security architecture and risk decisions for strategic AI initiatives, establish scalable guardrails and secure development patterns, and partner with AI platform, product, engineering, architecture, and security leaders to identify risks early, drive remediation, and improve secure-by-default outcomes.

Director-level technical leadership role responsible for shaping AI security strategy, security architecture, standards, and secure-by-design practices across AI platforms, products, and emerging agentic systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the AI security and security architecture roadmap across enterprise platforms and client-facing products.
• Establish firmwide security standards, reference patterns, guardrails, and governance requirements for AI systems, agentic workflows, and emerging AI technologies.
• Lead security architecture reviews, threat modeling, and risk assessments for strategic and high-risk AI initiatives.
• Drive security outcomes for LLM applications, RAG pipelines, agent workflows, model integrations, and tool ecosystems.
• Identify and drive remediation of risks including prompt injection, jailbreaks, unsafe tool usage, data exposure, insecure execution paths, and excessive agent permissions.
• Lead the security architecture strategy for AI-enabled systems and influence architectural decisions across engineering organizations and strategic platforms.
• Design and scale AI security guardrails, enforcement mechanisms, custom security tooling, and automated tests integrated into CI/CD and engineering workflows.
• Serve as the senior security partner to AI platform, product, engineering, architecture, and security leadership.
• Drive adoption of secure AI development and deployment practices across multiple engineering organizations.
• Lead complex technical investigations and response strategies involving AI-specific security risks and emerging threat vectors.
• Contribute to firmwide technology and security strategy, and represent AI and security architecture in executive, architecture, and governance forums.
• Mentor security engineers and strengthen technical capability across product security and adjacent engineering teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, product security, application security, cloud security, platform engineering, or security architecture.
• Demonstrated experience leading large-scale security initiatives across multiple teams and organizational boundaries.
• Deep technical understanding of distributed, cloud-native platforms and modern software delivery practices.
• Demonstrated ability to write code or scripts to support security testing, tooling, automation, and technical analysis.
• Proven ability to define technical strategy, architecture standards, and scalable security operating models in complex enterprise environments.
• Strong experience with security architecture, threat modeling, secure design reviews, and practical risk reduction.
• Proven ability to influence senior engineering, architecture, product, and business leaders without direct authority.
• Ability to analyze complex systems and communicate technical risk, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly and pragmatically to both technical and executive audiences.

Preferred Experience

• Experience building or securing enterprise AI/ML platforms and AI-enabled applications at scale.
• Experience with LLM applications, agent-based workflows, RAG pipelines, AI orchestration platforms, MCP integrations, or tool/plugin architectures.
• Deep familiarity with AI security risks including prompt injection, jailbreaks, tool misuse, data leakage, model supply-chain risk, and insecure agent behavior.
• Experience defining AI governance requirements, guardrails, secure deployment patterns, and control frameworks.
• Experience building security automation, policy enforcement, or CI/CD-integrated testing frameworks.
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