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
SUMMARY
Ares Management is seeking a highly motivated Vice President, AI Platform Engineering to help design, build, and scale the firm's enterprise AI platform and the production-grade capabilities that support AI solutions across the organization.
This is a senior, highly hands-on engineering role within the central Data & AI organization. The VP will have significant ownership of the core AI platform , including the common services, infrastructure, and developer capabilities used by AI applications, agents, and technology teams across the firm.
The successful candidate will combine strong software and platform engineering fundamentals with practical experience building Generative AI and machine learning systems in production. They will own major platform components and technical workstreams, contribute to platform architecture and engineering standards, and build reusable services that allow teams across Ares to develop AI applications securely, reliably, and at scale.
The role will work closely with AI Engineering leadership, Data Engineering, AI Product Management, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, and business-aligned technology teams. This individual will also serve as a senior technical partner to engineers adopting shared AI platform capabilities.
REPORTING RELATION S
Reports to: Principal, Head of AI Platform & Engineering
Supervises: Individual contributors and/or technical workstreams as required
PRIMARY FUNCTIONS & RESPONSIBILITIES
Core AI Platform Engineering
Design, build, and operate production-grade services that form the foundation of Ares' enterprise AI platform.
Own major platform components and technical workstreams from architecture and design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation.
Build reusable APIs, SDKs, services, libraries, and developer tooling that enable teams across the firm to build AI applications efficiently.
Establish stable interfaces that abstract applications from underlying model providers, infrastructure, and one-off implementations.
Write high-quality production code and participate actively in architecture reviews, design reviews, code reviews, testing, troubleshooting, and production support.
Contribute to platform architecture, engineering standards, design patterns, and technical roadmaps.
AI Gateway & Model Platform
Build and evolve the enterprise AI gateway and model abstraction layer supporting multiple model providers.
Implement model routing, provider abstraction, resiliency, rate limiting, usage controls, failover, and cost-management capabilities.
Develop common model access patterns that allow application teams to use approved models without coupling directly to individual providers.
Build and maintain model lifecycle, configuration, and deployment capabilities.
Evaluate new models and providers through practical experimentation and establish repeatable onboarding patterns.
Platform Services & Developer Experience
Develop shared AI APIs, SDKs, and platform services that accelerate delivery of AI capabilities across investment and corporate functions.
Build prompt infrastructure, prompt management, configuration, and reusable execution patterns.
Develop platform-level capabilities for agent execution, tool use, and emerging interoperability standards such as Model Context Protocol.
Partner with teams responsible for shared retrieval, document intelligence, search,…