About the Role
Ares is seeking a Vice President, Credit Engineering Lead to design, develop, and deliver technology solutions for the firm's global credit investment platform. This hands-on leadership role involves establishing engineering standards, modern architecture patterns, and software delivery best practices while leading a team of software engineers and overseeing the end-to-end software development lifecycle for credit technology initiatives.
Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor a team of software engineers supporting Credit Technology initiatives.
- Establish engineering standards, development practices, coding guidelines, and quality controls.
- Foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, continuous improvement, and collaboration.
- Provide hands-on coaching and technical guidance to team members.
- Drive adoption of agile development practices and modern engineering methodologies.
- Actively contribute to software development and remain deeply involved in implementation decisions.
- Design, develop, test, deploy, and support business-critical applications supporting credit investment workflows.
- Participate in code reviews, architecture reviews, troubleshooting, and production support activities.
- Lead development efforts across front-end, backend, integration, and data layers.
- Ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, secure, and aligned with enterprise engineering standards.
- Design and evolve modern cloud-native architectures supporting the credit technology ecosystem.
- Define architecture standards for distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, and microservices.
- Drive engineering decisions related to scalability, resiliency, performance, observability, and operational excellence.
- Lead development across credit deal management platforms, portfolio management solutions, credit analytics platforms, workflow automation solutions, investment data services and APIs, and reporting and analytics platforms.
- Ensure engineering teams deliver scalable technology solutions supporting deal sourcing and pipeline management, underwriting workflows, investment committee processes, portfolio monitoring, risk analytics, investment reporting, and investment data management.
- Architect and deploy applications using modern cloud-native technologies.
- Implement containerized solutions utilizing Kubernetes and cloud platform services.
- Drive modernization efforts focused on cloud adoption, scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency.
- Ensure proper observability, monitoring, logging, and operational support across production environments.
- Design and implement API-first architectures and integration frameworks.
- Leverage messaging platforms, event streaming, and asynchronous processing patterns to support scalable and resilient business platforms.
- Build solutions that integrate seamlessly across investment, data, and operational platforms.
- Partner with Data & AI teams to enable high-quality data flows and analytics capabilities.
- Own the end-to-end Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
- Establish CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, release management processes, and deployment standards.
- Drive improvements in software quality, development velocity, security, and operational stability.
- Ensure compliance with enterprise security, governance, regulatory, and operational resiliency requirements.
- Partner closely with Product Management to prioritize engineering initiatives and deliver business outcomes.
- Serve as a trusted technology advisor to real estate investment professionals, asset management teams, property management and operations stakeholders, finance, and broader Investment Technology partners.
- Translate complex real estate investment and operational requirements into scalable technical solutions.
- Communicate architecture decisions, delivery plans, risks, and engineering tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Requirements
- 9-12 years of progressive software engineering experience delivering enterprise technology solutions.
- 4+ years leading software engineering teams, technical organizations, or major technology initiatives.
- Demonstrated experience leading end-to-end software delivery within financial services environments.
- Experience supporting investment management, asset management, capital markets, banking, or alternative investment platforms.
- Strong preference for candidates with experience supporting direct lending, private credit, syndicated loans, CLOs, portfolio management, credit risk, or alternative asset management platforms.
- Proven track record building and operating business-critical applications within regulated environments.
- Experience partnering directly with product management, investment professionals, portfolio managers, operations teams, and senior business stakeholders.
- Experience leading modernization, platform transformation, organizational change, or cloud adoption initiatives.
- Experience mentoring and developing engineering talent.
- Familiarity with DealCloud, or other pipeline management systems, credit systems such as Allvue.
- WSO is a big plus.
Skills
- Advanced Java development expertise.
- Advanced React and TypeScript expertise.
- Deep expertise with relational and non-relational database technologies.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
- Strong API and integration design expertise.
- Strong knowledge of messaging and streaming technologies.
- Experience with cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Experience with Kubernetes and containerized application platforms.
- Experience designing highly scalable, highly available enterprise applications.
- Deep understanding of software architecture, engineering design patterns, and engineering best practices.
- Strong SDLC, CI/CD, automated testing, and DevOps expertise.
- Experience defining engineering standards and code quality practices.
- Strong troubleshooting, performance optimization, and operational support capabilities.
- Ability to balance architecture, delivery, quality, and hands-on development responsibilities.
- Hands-on technical leader comfortable contributing code alongside the engineering team.
- Strong architecture, system design, and technical decision-making capabilities.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Ability to build alignment across technology, product, investment, and operations teams.
- Ability to influence engineering direction through leadership, expertise, and sound judgment.
- High level of ownership, accountability, and execution focus.
Experience Level
- Vice President
- Lead
Salary/Compensations
- $250,000 - $275,000
Benefits
- Comprehensive Medical/Rx, Dental and Vision plans
- 401(k) program with company match
- Flexible Savings Accounts (FSA)
- Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSA) with company contribution
- Basic and Voluntary Life Insurance
- Long-Term Disability (LTD) and Short-Term Disability (STD) insurance
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Commuter Benefits plan for parking and transit
- Access to a world-class medical advisory team
- A mental health app that includes coaching, therapy and psychiatry
- A mindfulness and wellbeing app
- Financial wellness benefit that includes access to a financial advisor
- New parent leave
- Reproductive and adoption assistance
- Emergency backup care
- Matching gift program
- Education sponsorship program
About the Company
- 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.
