Associate Vice President, Business Manager - Investment Operations

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

Primary Responsibilities:

Strategic Planning & Roadmap Ownership

• Partner with business and functional leaders to identify operational pain points and define solutions across people, process, data, and technology.
• Build and maintain an operational roadmap that sequences process improvements and enables scale across the full lifecycle (including increasing focus on post-close and ongoing operational workflows).
• Develop business cases and prioritization frameworks (impact vs. effort, risk reduction, capacity uplift, service quality, data integrity), and drive stakeholder alignment on tradeoffs.
• Organize and run workshops with stakeholders to articulate roadmap and prioritization decisions??

Operating Model Execution

• Develop a detailed understanding of the end-to-end investment lifecycle – including roles and handoffs, controls, data dependencies, and supporting systems/tools.
• Lead continuous “bottoms-up” investment lifecycle reviews to identify bottlenecks, eliminate rework, reduce manual touchpoints, and improve operational clarity and consistency.
• Design future-state operating models and workflows, including RACI/ownership, SLAs, controls, documentation, and training/enablement plans.
• Execute and embed process changes so improvements “stick” through playbooks, adoption reinforcement, and ongoing operating rhythms (e.g., recurring process health reviews and issue triage).
• Measure outcomes through KPIs (cycle times, exception/break rates, adoption metrics, service levels), and iterate based on performance and stakeholder feedback

Infrastructure Optimization & Platform Enablement

• Bridge business needs and technology delivery by translating operating model requirements into clear functional requirements and target-state designs.
• Partner with Technology and functional teams to prioritize workflow/tooling enhancements and ensure solutions align to target-state processes.
• Stay current on emerging technologies, service-provider capabilities, and market trends; evaluate applicability to business workflows and operating model goals.
• Support vendor/provider assessments and proof-of-concepts, defining evaluation criteria tied to operational outcomes and scalability.

Innovation & Automation (AI Enablement)

• Act as a champion for innovation and automation—identifying high-impact use cases where AI and automation can reduce manual effort, improve quality, and accelerate cycle times in day-to-day operational activities.
• Maintain awareness of the AI/automation tooling landscape and practical use cases (e.g., diligence/research support, document workflows, approvals tracking, reporting enablement, knowledge management, operational analytics).
• Lead and coordinate AI/automation pilots in partnership with Technology and relevant control partners (Risk/Compliance/Legal as applicable), and scale successful solutions into standardized workflows.
• Establish working groups and “champions” networks to drive adoption, upskill teams, share best practices, and create consistent feedback loops; develop enablement materials (training sessions, resource pages, playbooks).

Business Engagement & Stakeholder Management

• Serve as a senior business partner, ensuring operational priorities and issues are communicated clearly and addressed across infrastructure teams.
• Drive effective stakeholder engagement through regular reviews, crisp executive updates, and clear decision points.
• Leverage the “power of the platform” by connecting initiatives and sharing best practices across strategies and functions to improve consistency and scale.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years of relevant experience in management consulting, strategy, COO/Business Management, operating model design/execution, process excellence, or related roles with strong implementation ownership.
• Demonstrated track record delivering measurable operational improvements (efficiency, scalability, control enhancement, data quality, stakeholder experience).
• Prior financial