Associate – M&A Diligence & Risk

Associate, M&A Diligence & Risk

Equal Parts · Austin, United States (Hybrid) · Full-time · Posted 2026-09-02

Salary: USD 100,000–130,000

Workplace: hybrid

Department: Operations

Description

Equal Parts is building the operating system for the modern insurance agency. Through a combination of acquisitions, in-house operations, and AI systems, we're creating a platform that scales relationships, not headcount.

Diligence is where that gets tested. We are not building a shop that does ten deals a year; we are building a system designed to do thousands. That changes what diligence has to be. It cannot be one person working a checklist deal by deal. It has to be a standard: repeatable, defensible, and encoded into the platform that runs our acquisitions.

We are hiring for trajectory. You will augment the person who built our diligence function, then run it, then own it. How fast that happens is up to you. The title and the range reflect where you are today, not where this seat goes. If you are looking for a job where the scope is fixed and the ceiling is someone else's, this is the wrong one.

You will report to our Head of M&A and work alongside a small senior deal team that owns origination and corporate development.

We value speed and we do not trade quality for it. Get clarity, validate what matters, and move. A slow yes costs us deals. A fast, wrong yes costs us more. This role lives in the discipline of doing both.

This is not a checklist role. Two profiles fail here. The first escalates everything, treats every discrepancy as disqualifying, and burns sellers on the way to a no. The second lets inconvenient findings soften because the deal is moving. We need the person in between.

Your mandate: verify what we are buying, be clear about what you found, and do it in a way that agency owners experience as respectful and straight rather than adversarial.

What You'll Do

Own the Diligence Standard

• Run diligence end to end on live acquisitions, with support at first and less of it over time. You do the work and you help set the bar. As volume grows, you will be the person who knows where the process is slow, where it is thin, and how it should change.
• Validate what the seller has represented. Start from their numbers, prove them against source data, and build an honest view of what the business will actually produce inside Equal Parts once it is ours.
• Size every issue and bring a recommendation. Name what you found, quantify it, lay out the options, and say what you would do. We want tactical recommendations backed by specifics, fast enough to decide on. Decisions get made with the deal team and business leaders; your job is to make those decisions easy and well-informed, and over time to be the person whose call gets taken as the answer.
• Partner with business unit leaders, the deal team, and other internal stakeholders to make sure we are getting full value from every acquisition. That means pushing on assumptions, including our own, and holding the line when it is uncomfortable.

Work Directly With Sellers

• Sit across from agency owners in the hardest conversations of the deal. Most are selling a business they built and identify with. Many are near the end of a career. This is not an institutional process and the owner does not want to be handled like it is one.
• Ask hard questions and get real answers without putting the relationship at risk. Pressure applied badly costs Equal Parts good deals; pressure not applied at all costs us more.
• Bring findings to owners directly, explain what they mean in plain terms, and work with them toward a path forward where one exists.

Exercise Judgment in the Grey

• Know the difference between a business with messy books and a business with broken fundamentals. A $2M revenue agency does not keep records like a public company, and treating normal informality as a red flag kills good deals. Treating a structural problem as normal informality closes a deal we should not have done, and we find out twelve months later when the money is already spent.
• Know what is not grey. Licensing, carrier appointments, trust account integrity, regulatory compliance, undisclosed litigation. These are binary and you will treat them that way.
• Look for the path to yes without softening what you found. Deals should die because the business does not hold up, not because diligence lacked the imagination to work with the wider team and structure around a solvable problem.

Build the System

• Work inside an AI-native operating model. Our platform runs the acquisition process and absorbs the mechanical work: document collection, tie-outs, schedules, tracking. You are not hired to administer a checklist. We will automate nearly all of it. What stays with you is the relationship, the seller-facing execution, and the judgment calls that get brought to the table.
• Turn your judgment into the platform's logic. What you work out on deal twelve should be how the system behaves on deal two hundred.
• Partner with our product and engineering team to shape how diligence works at scale.

Flex Across the Deal Team

Diligence will not fill this role in the early days, and we want someone who does not want it to. Without losing focus on your primary role, expect to take on real scope outside your lane, including:

• Revenue operations
• Surge support on live seller conversations and deal evaluation alongside the deal team
• Integration support, particularly on the handoff of diligence findings into post-close execution

This is a small team building something large. The right person sees that as the appeal.

Requirements

• 2+ years in transaction advisory, financial due diligence, corporate development, private equity, investment banking, or M&A. You have seen diligence workstreams run and you have owned pieces of them. You are looking for the seat where you own the whole thing.
• You think like an owner already. You have opinions about how the work should be done, you push when something is wrong, and you do not wait to be told what the next question is.
• Strong financial acumen. You can read a set of financials, normalize them, and explain what you are looking at to someone who is not an accountant.
• Judgment under incomplete information. You can explain a call you made on a messy set of facts, why you made it, and what would have changed your answer.
• Comfort with owner-operators. You can hold a direct, uncomfortable conversation with a business owner and have the relationship come out intact.
• Comfort working with AI-native tooling and a bias toward encoding your work rather than repeating it.

Preferred

• Insurance sector experience. Commission and contingent revenue, carrier relationships, retention dynamics, agency management systems, licensing and compliance. Preferred, not required; we will teach it to the right person.
• M&A experience with similarly sized targets in other fragmented industries. Valuable, and not a substitute for the judgment and relationship skills above.
• Austin-based. We will consider exceptional candidates nationally.

Benefits

For eligible employees, Equal Parts offers a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your health, well-being, and financial stability.

• Major Medical Health Insurance - Robust medical coverage with employer contributions toward premiums.
• Voluntary Benefits - Access to dental, vision, supplemental life, disability, accident, and other optional coverages.

Apply

Apply at Equal Parts

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