Vice President, Fund Finance Technology

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

Finance Technology is building a dedicated team for the Financial Planning Platform. The Vice President, Fund Finance Technology owns the strategy, roadmap, prioritization, adoption, user experience, and business outcomes for the platform, which helps the organization look forward through forecasting, scenario modeling, strategic planning, performance insights, and decision support. The role works closely with Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Fund Accounting (FA), Finance leadership, investment teams and other relevant front-office stakeholders, the Corporate Strategy Group (CSG), Enterprise Technology, Enterprise Data Engineering, Reporting & BI, application teams, and delivery partners. CSG leads the broader program and project execution, while this role provides direction, platform ownership, user experience leadership, and long-term roadmap accountability. This is a hands-on role requiring direct engagement with users, planning data, models, formulas, calculations, assumptions, drivers, workflows, integrations, reporting, and platform configuration. The role requires frequent engagement with senior finance and business leaders and is expected to become a trusted partner in shaping how finance users plan, forecast, evaluate scenarios, and make strategic decisions. Success requires strong judgment, curiosity, credibility, and the ability to build trust with users and senior leadership.

REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS

Reports to: Finance Technology leadership; aligned to the Financial Planning Platform capability

Supervises: None initially; provides leadership across internal teams and delivery partners

PRIMARY FUNCTIONS & RESPONSIBILITIES

Forward-looking planning, scenarios, and decision support

Own the platform roadmap supporting forecasting, budgeting, scenario modeling, strategic planning, workforce planning, performance management, and management decision support.

Partner with FP&A, Fund Accounting, Finance leadership, and investment teams and other relevant front-office stakeholders to understand business drivers, assumptions, investment activity, fund performance, capital deployment, growth opportunities, risks, and potential outcomes.

Improve the speed, quality, and transparency of forward-looking analysis and help users compare scenarios and understand the impact of changing assumptions.

Translate complex financial and operational questions into intuitive platform solutions, analytics, workflows, and decision-support experiences.

Strategy, roadmap, and outcomes

Own the platform vision, strategy, roadmap, investment priorities, and backlog.

Lead discovery and translate user and business needs into clear problems, intended outcomes, requirements, acceptance criteria, and prioritized work.

Make practical trade-offs across value, user impact, complexity, risk, dependencies, timing, and delivery capacity.

Operate effectively in ambiguous environments by defining problems, establishing priorities, and creating structure where formal processes may not yet exist.

Define success measures and use adoption, user feedback, business value, platform health, and delivery outcomes to guide decisions.

Create and present clear presentation materials covering product strategy, roadmaps, investment priorities, business cases, delivery progress, adoption, and outcomes.

Influence strategic priorities and investment decisions through data-driven recommendations, business cases, roadmap proposals, and executive communication.

Hands-on platform and data leadership

Develop working knowledge of platform data, models, formulas, calculations, assumptions, dimensions, hierarchies, workflows, integrations, reporting structures, and dependencies.

Work directly with users, data, models, configuration, calculations, and reporting outputs to understand issues and identify improvements.

Investigate platform, data, workflow, and reporting issues directly rather than relying exclusively on support teams or partners.

Participate actively in solution design, model reviews, testing, release validation, and platform evaluations.

Work closely with planning modelers and engineers to translate product priorities and user needs into scalable model designs, formulas, workflows, integrations, and user experiences.

AI-enabled workflows and user experience

Identify opportunities to improve projections, scenario analysis, planning workflows, user experience, productivity, insights, and decision-making through AI-enabled capabilities.

Partner with Enterprise Technology, enterprise AI teams, and relevant data teams to evaluate, prioritize, and deliver practical AI-driven solutions.

Help move successful prototypes into governed, reusable, secure, and supportable platform solutions.

Apply user research, journey and workflow analysis, prototyping, feedback, and adoption practices to create simpler, more intuitive experiences.

Drive adoption by helping users embrace new processes, technologies, workflows, and AI-enabled ways of working.

Relationships, trust, and senior leadership engagement

Serve as the primary product partner within Finance Technology for FP&A, Fund Accounting, Finance leadership, investment teams and other relevant front-office stakeholders.

Build trusted, durable relationships by listening closely, understanding user challenges, communicating transparently, and delivering reliably.

Act as a credible thought partner rather than a requirements collector, helping stakeholders frame problems, evaluate options, and make decisions.

Influence cross-functional teams without direct authority and align stakeholders with competing priorities.

Communicate direction, priorities, progress, risks, dependencies, and decisions clearly to users and senior leadership.

Data, reporting, and delivery partnership

Work hand in hand with the Corporate Strategy Group (CSG), which leads the broader program and project execution, to align scope, priorities, governance, milestones, risks, communications, adoption, and benefits realization.

Provide product direction, platform expertise, user experience leadership, and long-term roadmap ownership within CSG-led transformation initiatives.

Partner with Enterprise Technology, Enterprise Data Engineering, Data Governance, Reporting & BI, application, AI, and delivery teams to define needs and scalable solutions while maintaining Finance Technology ownership of platform outcomes and user experience.

Help establish clear ways of working with planning modelers and engineers, including defined handoffs across product direction, model design, engineering, testing, release readiness, support, and continuous improvement.

Promote governed data sources, consistent definitions, appropriate controls, lineage, and clear ownership.

Ensure releases meet business requirements, acceptance criteria, control expectations, and operational readiness standards.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education

Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline. Equivalent relevant experience will be considered.

Experience Required

8+ years in product or technology leadership, product management, Finance Technology, enterprise applications, financial systems, data products, or a related role in a controlled enterprise envi