Head of Geospatial & Physical Risk Platform & Governance

Your Team Responsibilities

MSCI is seeking an experienced technical leader to architect, build, and govern the geospatial and physical risk platform infrastructure that will enable MSCI's climate risk, nature risk, and geospatial solutions for the next 3-5 years. This Executive Director will make critical technology and platform architecture decisions that determine how MSCI delivers scalable, reliable, and high-performance physical climate risk analytics to thousands of investors, banks, and insurers globally.

This is a strategic technical leadership role requiring deep expertise in geospatial systems, distributed data platforms, and the ability to translate diverse research requirements into unified platform capabilities. You will work at the intersection of climate science, geospatial technology, and enterprise data engineering—making architectural decisions today that enable product innovations 2-3 years out while ensuring operational excellence for current solutions.

This role is part of MSCI's Platform & Governance function, serving as the technical foundation that enables multiple product teams across Investment Research to deliver differentiated climate and nature risk solutions. You will lead a team of XXX geospatial engineers, platform engineers, data engineers, and technical program managers, partnering intensively with Research leadership to ensure the platform anticipates and enables research innovation while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability, performance, and governance standards.

• Define and own the technical architecture for MSCI's geospatial and physical risk platform, making strategic build-vs-buy decisions and establishing technical standards that enable current operations while anticipating requirements 2-3 years out.
• Establish design patterns for geospatial data pipelines, spatial analytics workflows, and API contracts that enable rapid development and deployment of new physical risk models and client-facing analytics.
• Partner with Research leadership to translate research innovations into scalable platform capabilities, establishing clear service-level agreements and creating reusable components that accelerate research productivity while maintaining production reliability standards.
• Lead cross-functional engineering partnerships (platform, data engineering, cloud operations, AI/ML teams) to implement platform capabilities, translating research requirements into technical specifications, data schemas, and performance benchmarks while integrating advanced analytics capabilities.
• Identify opportunities to leverage emerging technologies including AI/ML for geospatial analytics, staying current with technology and climate data landscapes while driving proof-of-concepts that test new approaches to physical risk modeling challenges.
• Establish comprehensive data governance frameworks including quality standards, metadata, provenance tracking, versioning, and technical controls that ensure data integrity while enabling rapid research iteration.
• Set technical direction and establish engineering excellence standards for the platform team, fostering a culture of innovation balanced with operational discipline while developing technical talent.
• Engage with sophisticated clients on technical architecture questions—explaining platform capabilities, data provenance, computational methodologies, and integration patterns in ways that build confidence and enable informed decision-making.
• Participate in joint governance with Investment Research leadership to prioritize platform development, balancing competing demands from multiple product teams and ensuring platform investments deliver maximum strategic value.
• Drive platform cost optimization and efficiency, ensuring MSCI can scale to serve growing data volumes and user bases while maintaining appropriate cost structures and performance SLAs.

• 10+ years building or leading geospatial platforms, physical risk modeling infrastructure, catastrophe modeling systems, or similar large-scale spatial data platforms at financial institutions, insurance companies, specialized…