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. • Supp