Melanie Zhao, CFA , Vice President, is an Engineering Lead at BlackRock's Portfolio Management Group, where she leads the firm's AI adoption across the investment process. With a mandate to move AI from experimentation to enterprise-scale production, she sits at the rare intersection of financial domain expertise and modern software engineering — building the platforms and engineering culture that turn data into alpha.

Over her career, she has championed the use of AI to reimagine core asset management processes — from alpha generation and quantitative research to risk modeling and portfolio decision-making. Her approach is hands-on and outcome-driven: the hardest problem in AI for finance isn't the model, it's engineering the system, the trust, and the team around it.

Prior to BlackRock, Melanie worked as a Software Engineer and Data Scientist at NCR, focusing on machine learning, data processing, and cloud-native architectures. She holds a B.A. in Computer Science, a B.S. in Biology, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Emory University — bringing a rare blend of technical depth, investment domain knowledge, and platform leadership to the challenge of AI adoption in asset management.