Corporate Strategy

HARMAN is seeking a Director-level M&A professional to identify, evaluate, and execute acquisitions, strategic investments, and partnerships focused on AI-enabled experiences.

HARMAN is seeking a Director-level M&A professional to identify, evaluate, and execute acquisitions, strategic investments, and partnerships focused on AI-enabled experiences.
As a senior individual contributor within the M&A team, this role will combine end-to-end transaction leadership with strong strategic and commercial judgment. The Senior Director will develop investment theses, identify emerging companies and capabilities, lead valuation and diligence, support negotiation and structuring, and translate changes in AI, markets, and user behavior into strategic opportunities for HARMAN.
The mandate spans opportunities that could reshape how people and organizations discover, communicate, interact with products and environments, consume and create media, access services, and move experiences across devices and spaces — across consumer, automotive, professional, and other B2B environments.

• Develop strategic acquisitions, investment, and partnership theses around emerging AI-enabled experiences and enabling capabilities.
• Identify companies, capabilities, and business models that could strengthen HARMAN’s products, services, customer relationships, or ecosystem position.
• Translate market, competitive, and user-experience shifts into build, partner, invest, or acquire opportunities.
• Build relationships with founders, venture capital firms, investors, strategic partners, and emerging technology ecosystems.
• Partner with HARMAN business, product, and strategy leaders to connect external opportunities with long-term strategic priorities.

Evaluate opportunities across areas including:

• Conversational and agent-enabled experiences
• Voice, communication, translation, and intelligent interaction
• Personalization, identity, preferences, and contextual experiences
• Cross-device continuity and connected ecosystems
• Smart environments, ambient intelligence, and intelligent device orchestration
• AI-enabled media discovery, personalization, creation, and entertainment
• Hearing, accessibility, wellness, and assistive experiences
• AI-enabled search, discovery, recommendations, service, and commerce
• Professional and B2B experiences where AI can improve how customers interact with products, systems, content, or environments
• Emerging platforms and capabilities that could reshape connected-device and experience ecosystems.

The role is expected to identify new opportunity areas early and determine where they could create meaningful strategic or commercial advantage for HARMAN.

• Lead transactions from strategic thesis and target identification through valuation, LOI, diligence, negotiation, approval, close, and integration planning.
• Develop financial models, business cases, scenario analyses, and value-creation frameworks for acquisitions, minority investments, and strategic partnerships.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams, external advisors, and counter parties throughout the transaction process.
• Prepare investment memoranda, executive recommendations, board materials, and risk assessments.
• Evaluate strategic value beyond standalone financial returns, including growth potential, new capabilities, customer access, ecosystem advantage, talent, and long-term strategic optionality.

• Assess the user or customer problem being addressed and the strength of the underlying value proposition.
• Evaluate market attractiveness, adoption potential, competitive differentiation, business-model…