Associate Vice President – ESG – Data Operations

Associate Vice President – ESG – Data Operations

Requirements

• Ability to be flexible in terms of hours to coordinate with team members across various time zones (primary offices, in NY, LA and London)
• An analytical mind and a passion/interest in bringing innovative ideas to increase efficiency of existing processes.
• Dependable, great attitude, highly motivated and a team player.
• ESG data experience: Support the implementation of new systems and upgrades to existing software, particularly in relation to data collection, data governance and process design.
• Experience with ESG data in one of the primary focus on Direct Lending, Private Equity and Real Estate ESG business lines but ability to support all asset classes’ specific data requirements.
• Assist, alongside asset class needs, 3rd party ESG data vendor searches for the new and existing system refreshes or implementations.
• Determine if there are scaled ESG vendors across asset classes for pre-investment diligence, data collection requirements, and post-investment monitoring.
• Project management experience: Experience with Agile project management methodology is desirable. Ability to Build, maintain, and execute project plans. Keep the stakeholders and sponsors abreast of project and milestone updates. Ability to take responsibility for deliverables within a project.
• Technical skills: Strong excel skills required. Experience with relational databases, proficient with SQL for ad-hoc queries and data analysis and / or knowledge of Python and/or very strong willingness to learn. Experience connecting with third party APIs preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

• Engage in stakeholder management and balance the needs of different asset classes’ distinct ESG reporting needs and carbon footprint data collection to distill and prioritize ESG data roadmap across business lines and geographies.
• Engage with ESG leads to evaluate their needs and problems, clarify, and document requirements, and help design solutions with the application development team by translating business requirements into functional requirements.
• Create and chair a steering committee of key individuals from IT, Data Operations, ESG teams and IR and own strategic roadmap of ESG data build outs across Ares’ key asset classes, continually refreshing against evolving needs and regulations.
• Develop strategies for integrating distinct asset class financial data with ESG data/reporting requirements and being proactive/creative about how this can be addressed in the medium and long term.
• Translate ESG leads’ reporting requirements into business requirements with IT to develop internal and external reporting dashboards to enable monitoring of collected ESG data points.
• Establish the toolkit for ESG data collection including: Robust and repeatable data collection processes, Consideration for overall Ares Investment management data model in conjunction with ESG datasets, Consideration for future reporting needs when developing data collection processes and model, Identifying opportunities for global standardization and driving the initiative across business lines.
• Perform analysis across diverse and large datasets; effectively communicate research findings and relevant recommendations to the stakeholders and team members.
• Responsible for managing the necessary firmwide annual data collection processes to support the ESG team’s data needs and provide recommendations from prior business specific data collection efforts to provide best practices to create scale across the firm.
• Evaluate new and existing ESG data vendors to determine external data sets to supplement annual survey processes and test benefits to each business line.
• Collaborate with legal, ESG compliance and audit to scope out requirements for documentation for ESG investment process, fund specific requirements and global regulations.
• Ensure that ESG disclosure requirements are properly vetted and implemented in a well-controlled process from an end-to-end perspective.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Investment Operations, Fund Accounting, Information Technology or Software Development life cycle preferred
• Prior experience with an alternative asset manager preferred broader asset management experience preferred
• Experience with Tableau, SQL, or PowerBI
• Hedge fund, Credit or Private Equity experience is a plus