Associate Vice President, Business Manager - Investment Operations

Location: New York

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* 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
**** SUMMARY
* * Ares is seeking a highly motivated AVP to join the Business Management function-a strategic advisory and execution team focused on front-to-back process, technology, data, and operating infrastructure optimization across investment strategies and business units.

This role is designed for a strategic hands-on leader who can operate as a trusted partner to business strategy leadership & working groups (including Investment teams, IR, Portfolio Monitoring etc.) and key functional teams (Operations, Technology, Finance, Risk, Legal/Compliance, and third-party providers), while owning delivery of transformation initiatives that improve scalability, efficiency, and transparency.
** PRIMARY FUNCTIONS & 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…