Her Story
About Zainab
I started my career at BlackRock in 2013 as a finance major, knowing nothing about technology when I first started. Everything I really learned was on the job, working with engineers. I joined the Aladdin Technology Group, which was a platform built for BlackRock as well as other insurance companies, asset managers, and its competitors internationally to essentially build portfolios, do electronic trading, settlements, and operations - the full end-to-end life cycle of investment management. Over the 5 years I worked there, my niche became derivatives processing, collateral management, and payments. That's where I really got a passion for technology, and that's what has structured my career since then. Currently, I'm a senior product manager at a life insurance tech company, working on using cutting-edge innovation and artificial intelligence to speed up and optimize slow-moving and old-fashioned processes in the life insurance industry. One of my most notable achievements was a couple years ago when I was working at JustWorks, where my team and I were the first to build an AI engine and underwriting system that uses artificial intelligence to predict job codes and understand workers' compensation risk. We brought down the total time from 30 hours to real time and saved the company about $60 million a year.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Zainab
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
The advice I would give for women coming into the tech industry is to believe in yourself. I think it's very easy to be overwhelmed and feel like an imposter in an industry that's full of complexity and full of topics that are always changing, but 3 months or 4 months down the line after you have an idea, you'll be surprised to learn what you were thinking 4 months before might have been true. Just give faith and put some credence in some of the beliefs that you have going into an industry, having assumptions or even ideas that you might be a little bit afraid to kind of raise your hand or say. It's very common that others also might be thinking it, or others might not be thinking it, and it's actually a great idea and something that could lead to something more. So, believe in yourself and believe in your own critical thinking and intelligence, and really try to let those imposter syndrome feelings kick them to the curb if you can.
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