Vice President - Corporate 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

Ares is seeking a Corporate Technology India Lead, Engineering (Vice President) to join Corporate Technology in Mumbai, reporting to the global Head of Corporate Technology. This is a high-impact role serving as the senior Corporate Technology leader in India and a member of the Corporate Technology leadership team alongside the global Product and Engineering heads. The leader will provide local direction and connective leadership for up to 15 Mumbai-based employees supporting Human Resources, Legal & Compliance, Corporate Finance, and Corporate Services Technology - including colleagues aligned through dotted-line reporting - and support oversight of a comparable contractor workforce of approximately 15. While retaining direct accountability for engineering delivery and operational excellence, this individual will help create a cohesive local technology community of approximately 30 internal and external professionals.

This is a build-and-scale opportunity for a leader who wants to shape how the India Corporate Technology organization engineers, operates, and adopts AI. The role has meaningful influence over engineering culture, talent strategy, delivery practices, process maturity, knowledge management, and the evolution of business-critical platforms.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on full-stack engineering leader and credible technologist who combines deep technical judgment with strong people and organizational leadership. This person will operate as a player-coach: contributing directly to architecture, design, code reviews, prototypes, critical development, and production problem solving, while building a high-performing team. They will bring an AI-centric mindset and a practical record of using AI and automation to improve software delivery, business workflows, decision support, and team productivity within appropriate governance and control frameworks.

Success requires exceptional written and verbal communication, strong executive presence, and the ability to create clarity across cultures, time zones, and matrixed reporting lines. The leader must be a trusted bridge-builder across Product, Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Data, Information Security, Infrastructure, Service Management, and business-facing technology teams. They must be equally effective with engineers, product managers, senior business stakeholders, and enterprise technology partners, translating complex topics into crisp decisions, shared priorities, and measurable outcomes.

Success in this role will be reflected in the strength, cohesion, and engagement of the India technology community; clear direction across direct and dotted-line teams; predictable, high-quality delivery; improved platform reliability and engineering productivity; responsible adoption of AI; and durable processes and knowledge assets that reduce key-person dependency and allow the organization to scale.

PRIMARY FUNCTIONS AND ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

• Serve as the Corporate Technology site leader in Mumbai and a member of the Corporate Technology leadership team; contribute to technology strategy, portfolio priorities, workforce planning, operating model, and culture.
• Provide visible, day-to-day direction, prioritization, and connective leadership for up to 15 Mumbai-based Product and Engineering colleagues across Human Resources, Legal & Compliance, Corporate Finance, and Corporate Services, including individuals whose formal reporting lines sit with global leaders; align objectives, capacity, ways of working, development, and the local team experience in partnership with their direct managers.
• Lead through influence in a matrixed global model with exceptional communication and follow-through; build trust, establish clear accountabilities, surface risks early, explain tradeoffs, facilitate difficult conversations, resolve cross-team friction, and maintain strong alignment across Mumbai, New York, and Los Angeles.
• Own engineering delivery and operational health across assigned Corporate Technology solutions, ensuring applications and platforms are scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable, and audit-ready.
• Remain hands-on as a full-stack engineer: contribute to solution architecture and design, build prototypes and critical components, review code, troubleshoot complex issues, and support high-severity production incidents.
• Partner with Product leaders and business stakeholders to translate roadmaps and business needs into clear technical requirements, architecture decisions, delivery plans, tradeoffs, and measurable outcomes.
• Define and execute an AI and automation agenda for Corporate Technology in Mumbai, in partnership with global Product, Engineering, Data, Architecture, Information Security, and relevant control functions; prioritize use cases based on business value, feasibility, risk, and adoption.
• Drive practical, responsible adoption of AI across the software delivery lifecycle and corporate workflows, including assisted development, testing, documentation, knowledge discovery, incident analysis, workflow automation, summarization, and decision support, with appropriate data protection, human oversight, evaluation, auditability, and monitoring.
• Establish disciplined operating rhythms and a strong process and knowledge-management culture, including architecture decision records, engineering standards, reusable patterns, design reviews, runbooks, playbooks, onboarding materials, communities of practice, retrospectives, and measurable continuous-improvement actions; use AI-enabled tools to make knowledge current, discoverable, and reusable.
• Own end-to-end solution delivery: discovery, architecture/design, build/configuration, data and integration work, testing/UAT, release, adoption, and production support, aligned with SDLC, change management, and operational readiness expectations.
• Establish and reinforce common engineering standards across the portfolio, including code quality, peer review, version control, automated testing, CI/CD, environment management, observability, documentation, and release governance.
• Guide the design of modern applications, services, APIs, workflows, and data flows; make pragmatic decisions that balance strategic modernization, reuse, time to value, platform constraints, control requirements, and total cost of ownership.
• Act as a bridge across Product, Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, Data/Analytics, Infrastructure/Cloud, Service Management, and adjacent application teams; clarify ownership, resolve seams, manage dependencies, and ensure alignment with cybersecurity, identity/access, data governance, privacy, records retention, resiliency, and responsible AI standards.
• Drive operational excellence through proactive monitoring, capacity and performance management, incident/problem management, root-cause analysis, technical debt reduction, runbooks, service metrics, and continuous improvement.
• Build, coach, and retain strong engineering talent in Mumbai; provide local coaching, performance input, and development direction for direct and dotted-line colleagues in partnership with their formal managers; contribute to hiring, succession planning, technical mentorship, and targeted development opportunities while fostering a culture of ownership, inclusion, transparency, high standards, and continuous learning.
• Support oversight of a contractor and delivery-partner population of comparable scale (approximately 15), including capacity planning, onboarding, work allocation, delivery performance, quality, cost discipline, documentation, knowledge transfer, and vendor escalation; ensure external professionals operate as integrated members of the team while maintaining clear accountability and Ares standards.
• Provide concise, transparent, executive-ready reporting and written decision materials on delivery, platform health, engineering quality, AI adoption, talent, risks, issues, dependencies, and remediation plans.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of progressive technology experience, including significant hands-on full-stack software engineering and enterprise application delivery.
• 5+ years of people and organizational leadership experience, with a proven record leading senior engineers and multidisciplinary teams through a combination of direct, dotted-line, and influence-based leadership; experience providing direction to organizations of comparable scale is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a player-coach, balancing direct technical contribution with portfolio delivery, team leadership, and executive engagement.
• Experience serving as a local engineering or site leader, with accountability for talent, culture, delivery coordination, process maturity, senior escalation management, and the effective integration of employees, contractors, and globally aligned teams.
• Demonstrated experience applying AI and automation to engineering practices and/or enterprise business workflows, with the judgment to move from experimentation to secure, governed, measurable adoption.
• Experience in complex, regulated financial services; alternative asset management experience strongly preferred.
• Bachelor's degree required; Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline preferred.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills are essential, including the ability to synthesize complex information, write crisp executive materials, influence senior stakeholders, build durable relationships, resolve conflict constructively, and create alignment across regions, cultures, and technology functions.

Experience Required

• Deep full-stack engineering expertise and recent hands-on delivery experience, including:
  • Proficiency in at least one modern backend stack (e.g., Java/Spring, C#/.NET, Python, Node.js/TypeScript, or comparable)
  • Proficiency in at least one modern web framework (e.g., React, Angular, or comparable), with a strong understanding of user experience, performance, and secure development
  • Strong SQL, relational data modeling, data analysis/troubleshooting, and comfort navigating complex process and data flows
  • Experience designing and consuming REST APIs, services, event/messaging patterns, and batch integrations
  • Experience with source control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, cloud or modern enterprise hosting, containers where applicable, and application observability
• Practical fluency with enterprise AI solution patterns and AI-assisted engineering, with demonstrated ability to move valuable use cases into governed production adoption; familiarity with large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, evaluation, observability, and secure data grounding is strongly valued.
• Proven ability to establish scalable engineering processes and knowledge-management disciplines that improve quality, onboarding, reuse, supportability, and organizational resilience.
• Strong software architecture fundamentals, including modular design, scalability, resiliency, security, maintainability, integration, data, and control considerations.
• Demonstrated success delivering and operating business-critical enterprise applications through the full SDLC, including testing, release/change management, adoption, production support, incident/problem management, and root-cause analysis.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications and platforms while managing operational risk, controls, business continuity, and stakeholder change.
• Proven success leading multiple teams or a portfolio across different business domains, including directing work across direct and dotted-line employees and external partners; able to prioritize and sequence work in partnership with Product leaders.
• Strong people leadership capabilities, including hiring, coaching, performance management, career development, succession planning, and building inclusive, high-performing engineering cultures.
• Demonstrated ability to build bridges across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Data, Security, Infrastructure, Service Management, and adjacent technology functions, creating clarity, trust, shared accountability, and momentum across global time zones and organizational boundaries.
• Experience managing vendors, systems integrators, or external engineering partners at meaningful scale, including capacity planning, performance management, documentation, knowledge transfer, cost control, and operational readiness.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting Corporate Technology domains such as Human Resources, Legal & Compliance, Corporate Finance, procurement/expense, workplace, or other Corporate Services.
• Experience with one or more core ERP or finance ecosystems (e.g., Oracle, Workday, or comparable), including integrations, master/reference data, controls, close/reporting dependencies, and multi-entity or multi-currency operations.
• Experience supporting a public company or similarly controlled environment, with familiarity with SOX/internal controls, audit, financial reporting, segregation of duties, evidence retention, and enterprise risk management expectations.
• Prior involvement in ERP modernization, finance transformation, enterprise platform rationalization, or other large-scale process and technology transformation programs.
• Experience building or scaling an engineering organization or capability center in Mumbai while integrating it into a global Product and Engineering model.
• Experience with cloud migration, application modernization, enterprise workflow and low-code platforms, automation, data platforms, and engineering productivity initiatives.
• Familiarity with engineering, AI adoption, knowledge-management, and operational metrics used to improve delivery predictability, quality, reliability, developer experience, and business outcomes.

General Requirements

• Strong ownership mindset with disciplined, outcomes-focused execution; able to thrive in a fast-paced environment, manage competing priorities, and deliver high-quality outcomes.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and translating evolving business needs into durable technical solutions, clear decisions, and actionable team direction.
• Collaborative, inclusive, and service-oriented approach; a natural connector who can build credibility with engineers, Product partners, business stakeholders, control functions, and peer technology leaders, and who proactively connects teams, resolves friction, and advances shared outcomes.
• High standards, intellectual curiosity, and a continuous-learning mindset, with a commitment to remaining technically engaged while operating effectively at Vice President and leadership-team level.
• Willingness to flex hours as needed to support global leadership forums, stakeholders, critical releases, and production needs across India and U.S. time zones.

Reporting Relationships

Head of Business Operations Systems

There is no set deadline to apply for this job opportunity. Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the search is no longer active.