Vice President, Data Services

 Ares Management is seeking a Vice President, Data Services for defining and executing the enterprise strategy for delivering trusted, governed, and scalable data products to consumers across the organization and external ecosystems. This role leads the architecture, engineering, and operations of modern data distribution platforms supporting APIs, services, event streaming, data sharing, and real-time data delivery.

The successful candidate combines deep expertise in API platforms, event-driven architecture, Databricks data sharing, streaming technologies, and cloud-native engineering with proven experience building and scaling enterprise data platforms.

Reports to: Principal, Head of Data Platforms

Supervises: n/a

·       Define and execute the enterprise Data Distribution strategy and multi-year roadmap.

·       Establish a product-driven approach to delivering enterprise data products and data services.

·       Build and lead high-performing engineering teams responsible for API, streaming, and data-sharing platforms.

·       Drive adoption of modern data distribution patterns, including APIs, GraphQL, event streams, and data products.

·       Partner with business, architecture, data governance, and platform teams to align distribution capabilities with strategic objectives.

·       Define platform KPIs, consumer adoption metrics, SLAs, and operational performance standards.

·       Lead the design and operation of enterprise API platforms enabling standardized access to data products.

·       Establish API-first principles for internal and external data consumption.

·       Develop reusable frameworks for secure, scalable, and governed data services.

·       Define standards for API lifecycle management, versioning, documentation, and discoverability.

·       Enable self-service access to enterprise data through modern service interfaces.

·       Partner with domain teams to expose business capabilities as consumable data services.

·       Establish data product delivery patterns using Databricks Delta Sharing and secure cloud-native distribution mechanisms.

·       Ensure data products are discoverable, governed, and consumable through enterprise catalogs.

·       Drive adoption of data marketplace and self-service data consumption capabilities.

·       Partner directly with stakeholders across Investment Operations, Finance, Compliance, Investor Relations, Risk, and Investment teams.

·       Translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.

·       Drive successful delivery of strategic data initiatives and enhancements.

·       Implement and support data quality controls, lineage, metadata, and governance capabilities.

·       Contribute to data security, privacy, and compliance requirements.

·       Establish technical standards and engineering best practices.

·       Lead technical workstreams and complex engineering initiatives.

·       Mentor junior team members and provide technical guidance.

·       Participate in architecture discussions and technology evaluations.

·       Collaborate with leadership on platform roadmap and prioritization efforts.

• 12+ years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, API platforms, or data architecture.
• 8+ years of leadership experience managing engineering organizations.
• Proven experience building enterprise-scale API, streaming, and data-sharing platforms.
• Experience delivering cloud-native data solutions on Azure and Databricks.
• Strong background in enterprise data architecture and large-scale data ecosystems.
• Experience in financial services, asset management, banking, fintech, or other highly regulated industries preferred.

·       Extensive experience (12+ years) designing and operating enterprise-scale data distribution platforms utilizing REST APIs, GraphQL, API gateways, and microservices architectures to deliver governed and consumable data products.

·       Deep expertise implementing Databricks Catalog Sharing, Delta Sharing, Unity Catalog, and Lakehouse architectures to enable secure internal and external data sharing across business domains and partners.

·       Proven experience building real-time data distribution solutions using Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Azure Event Hubs, Service Bus, and event-driven architectures.

·       Strong hands-on experience developing cloud-native data services on Azure, including API Management, Kubernetes (AKS), functions, Databricks, and modern distributed data platforms.

·       Expertise implementing data product operating models, data contracts, semantic layers, metadata-driven discovery, and self-service data consumption capabilities.

·       Strong experience establishing security, governance, observability, lineage, entitlement management, authentication, authorization, and audit controls across enterprise distribution channels.