Over the last 20 years, Ares’ success has been driven by our people and our culture. Today, our team is guided by our core values – Collaborative, Responsible, Entrepreneurial, Self-Aware, Trustworthy – and our purpose to be a catalyst for shared prosperity and a better future. Through our recruitment, career development and employee-focused programming, we are committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment where high-performance talent of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can build careers within this exciting and growing industry.

Job Description

Ares Management is currently seeking an experienced and detail-oriented Senior Financial Associate to join the Finance and Accounting team in Los Angeles as part of the firm’s Real Estate group. 

The Senior Financial Associate will work closely with the global F&A team in partnering across our enterprise with the Performance team, divisional Real Estate CFOs, senior Finance leadership senior investment professionals, Investor Relations team, information technology resources and developers.  They will provide day-to-day support with respect to calculating, analyzing, communicating and reporting fund returns/metrics. 

The ideal candidate will possess public and private experience alongside strong leadership and business stakeholder relationship skills. Specific responsibilities include the creation, maintenance, and enhancement of data tracking and reporting procedures, the development and troubleshooting of the Real Estate data infrastructure, and the creation of dashboards to enhance the reporting of investment-level, fund-level and LP Net performance. The candidate will also provide support in the marketing efforts, and enhance overall data analytics capabilities.

The candidate must possess data analytical skills and have a working knowledge of financial principles and key investment metrics such as TWR, IRR and MOIC. Some program management experience is preferred. This candidate will be expected to understand complex fund structures, waterfalls and gross to net return differences.  This role will also require a dynamic, adaptive, and agile hands-on professional who will be capable of ensuring optimal performance and processes in a fast-paced rapidly growing environment.

Primary functions and essential responsibilities

Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Calculate, monitor, evaluate, and analyze investment, portfolio level and composite returns (TWR, IRR, Multiples, etc.)
• Research returns that are outside of acceptable ranges and ensure adherence to internal guidelines. Communicate results with internal groups
• Lead and assist with projects that facilitate improvements across the REG, including performance data review, validation, and efficiency improvements where needed
• Must be able to research questions through analysis of financial information
• Aggregation, analysis and management of portfolio and investment return data on a levered, unlevered, gross basis, net basis, actual and projected data
• Assist in data aggregation for RFP, DDQ and RFIs for fundraising
• Financial modeling, enhancement of modeling, data capture (including asset level) and reporting
• Aggregation of data for presentations targeted at existing and/or potential investors
• Contribute expertise to team and organizational efforts in relation to systems and internal processes
• Work directly with equity portfolio management team for the collection and aggregation of deal level models and returns
• Participate in other projects as requested by management

Qualifications

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Finance required
• Master’s degree preferred

Experience Required:  

• Minimum of 5+ years of experience in Finance and Accounting, Public Accounting, Corporate Finance or a related field with an understanding of Real Estate fund structures, investment property structures, and alternative investments.  Public and private experience a plus.
• Strong understanding of Accounting principles and public company financial statements (income statements & balance sheets)
• Experience measuring, analyzing or reporting investment performance
• Technically proficient with all MS Office applications like Excel (Macro), Visio, PowerPoint and visualization tools like Power BI
• Knowledge of fund operations, fund structures, and characteristics of various financial instruments preferred.
• Knowledge of GIPS and performance measurement concepts preferred.
• Knowledge of data arch