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
Finance Technology is building a dedicated team for the Financial Planning Platform. The Financial Planning Platform Lead owns the strategy, roadmap, prioritization, adoption, user experience, and business outcomes for the platform, which helps the organization look forward through forecasting, scenario modeling, strategic planning, performance insights, and decision support. The role works closely with Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Fund Accounting (FA), Finance leadership, investment teams and other relevant front-office stakeholders, the Corporate Strategy Group (CSG), Enterprise Technology, Enterprise Data Engineering, Reporting & BI, application teams, and delivery partners. CSG leads the broader program and project execution, while this role provides direction, platform ownership, user experience leadership, and long-term roadmap accountability. This is a hands-on platform leadership role requiring significant Anaplan experience and direct engagement with users, planning data, dynamic models, formulas, calculations, assumptions, drivers, workflows, integrations, reporting, and platform configuration. Beyond individual modeling capability, the role is expected to set the standard for dynamic planning design, guide and challenge modelers and delivery partners, and lead others toward scalable, maintainable, strategically coherent solutions. The role requires frequent engagement with senior finance and business leaders and is expected to become a trusted partner in shaping how finance users plan, forecast, evaluate scenarios, and make strategic decisions. Success requires strong judgment, curiosity, credibility, technical depth, and the ability to lead through influence across business, product, modeling, and engineering teams.
REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS
Reports to: Finance Technology leadership; aligned to the Financial Planning Platform capability
Supervises: None initially; provides leadership across internal teams and delivery partners
PRIMARY FUNCTIONS & RESPONSIBILITIES
Forward-looking planning, scenarios, and decision support
Own the platform roadmap supporting forecasting, budgeting, scenario modeling, strategic planning, workforce planning, performance management, and management decision support.
Partner with FP&A, Fund Accounting, Finance leadership, investment teams and other relevant front-office stakeholders to understand business drivers, assumptions, investment activity, fund performance, capital deployment, growth opportunities, risks, and potential outcomes.
Improve the speed, quality, and transparency of forward-looking analysis and help users compare scenarios and understand the impact of changing assumptions.
Translate complex financial and operational questions into intuitive platform solutions, analytics, workflows, and decision-support experiences.
Strategy, roadmap, and outcomes
Own the platform vision, strategy, roadmap, investment priorities, and backlog.
Lead discovery and translate user and business needs into clear problems, intended outcomes, requirements, acceptance criteria, and prioritized work.
Make practical trade-offs across value, user impact, complexity, risk, dependencies, timing, and delivery capacity.
Operate effectively in ambiguous environments by defining problems, establishing priorities, and creating structure where formal processes may not yet exist.
Define success measures and use adoption,…