AVP – Investment Operations (Data & ESG)

Job Description

This individual will work closely with the business stakeholders in the various business lines mentioned previously and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) leads to provide solutions supporting ESG data needs, collection, and reporting. To be successful, the ideal candidate would have experience in thoughtful strategic planning around data integrity and governance with an ability to anticipate and respond to future business needs. The role requires a dynamic, adaptive, and versatile experienced hands-on professional to ensure best practices in a fast-paced rapidly growing environment.

Specific Responsibilities include, but not limited to:

• 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.
• Design, develop and evolve the blueprint of ESG Data Model framework with the collaboration of technology team.
• Ensure data governance is at the forefront of all systems and process design. Promote the benefits and importance of data governance.
• Responsibility for the team uploading/entering data into the relevant systems – including, making initial checks of the data for omissions and initial accuracy and liaison with data owner to resolve issues. 
• Perform analysis across diverse and large datasets; Effectively communicate research findings and relevant recommendations to the stakeholders and team members. 
• Conduct outlier analysis and understand drivers of potential data issues to drive ESG key metrics & reporting needs.
• Developing an understanding of the challenges of amalgamating the investment management data and working with IT to build a strategic roadmap to aggregate ESG data/reporting requirements for the business. 
• Work alongside with legal, 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.

General 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
• Technical skills:
• Strong excel skills required.
• Familiarity with institutional asset management research, trading workflows, and associated systems. Solid understanding of the data points associated with different asset classes.
• 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.
• 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.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in finance or other business-related discipline

Experience Required

• Minimum of 10 years of experience in high quality, global capital markets or investment management firms with expertise in Data Operations
• 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 Power BI
• Hedge fund, Credit or Private Equity experience is a plus