Position Summary
The Associate Vice President serves as the financeโside leader for artificial intelligence, reporting, and strategy within the Finance Process & Operations (FPO) team. This role is the business counterpart to Carlyleโs Corporate Services AI engineering function: where engineering builds the firmโs next generation of AIโnative products, this role owns the finance strategy behind themโidentifying the highestโleverage opportunities, translating ambiguous business problems into scoped solutions, orchestrating delivery in partnership with engineering, and owning adoption and realized value across finance. The AVP sets the AI vision and roadmap for FPOโs finance functions, selecting the spots where AI and automation deliver the biggest payoff and focusing the firmโs investment on a few highโimpact workflows. The role pairs this strategic mandate with a buildโandโship orientation, leading a small, agile team that forms quickly around highโpriority finance challenges and delivers solutions at speed.
InโOffice Requirement: 4 days a week
Primary Responsibilities
- AI Strategy & Opportunity Leadership (~25%)
- Own the AI vision, strategy, and roadmap for the FPO finance functions, picking the spots where AI and automation deliver the biggest payoff and sequencing investment accordingly.
- Maintain a prioritized portfolio of AI use cases across finance, scoring opportunities on value, feasibility, and effort to focus the firmโs enterprise muscle on a few highโimpact workflows.
- Go narrow and deep on priority workflows, rethinking how the work is done with an AIโfirst lens rather than bolting AI onto existing steps.
- Define a small set of outcome metrics leadership tracksโsuch as cycleโtime, accuracy, exception volume, and throughputโand tie every AI initiative back to measurable business value.
- Continuously scan the AI landscapeโmodels, agentic frameworks, and toolsโand bring promising, matured capabilities into finance practice.
- Finance Strategic Partner & Translation (~20%)
- Act as a trusted AI advisor to finance leadership and function heads, reimagining workflows alongside the people who run them.
- Embed with finance stakeholders to identify, scope, and frame the highestโleverage AI opportunities, translating ambiguous business problems into clear, wellโstructured solution requirements.
- Serve as the bridge between finance endโusers and the Corporate Services AI engineering team, ensuring what gets built is what teams will actually use.
- Maintain executive presenceโask the right questions, push back when needed, and earn trust at senior levels of the firm.
- Champion intellectual honesty about AI: what current models can and cannot reliably do, and where AI is the right tool versus traditional automation or process redesign.
- Solution Orchestration & Delivery (~20%)
- Orchestrate AI solution delivery end to endโdiscovery, requirements, design, build with engineering, testing, deployment, adoption, and iteration.
- Establish reusable building blocks for finance AIโuseโcase assessment frameworks, prompt and agent patterns, evaluation criteria, and adoption playbooksโso each new solution starts further ahead than the last.
- Run agile delivery for the teamโs portfolio, balancing rapid tactical wins against the strategic roadmap.
- Partner with GTS/AI engineering, data, and security teams so solutions deploy cleanly and meet enterprise standards for controls, observability, and audit.
- Drive adoption and change managementโtraining, communication, and workflow redesignโto convert delivered solutions into realized value, closing the gap between pilot and production.
- Dynamic Tactical ProblemโSolving Team (~15%)
- Lead a small, agile, crossโfunctional team that forms quickly around highโpriority finance challenges and delivers solutions at speed.
- Foster a buildโandโship, fastโiteration culture: prototype quickly, prove value in weeks, and scale what works.
- Prioritize incoming problems so the team focuses on the highestโimpact, most timeโsensitive opportunities first.
- Bring structure, judgment, and decisiveness to ambiguous problems, operating with autonomy and a bias for action.
- Pull in the right crossโfunctional expertiseโfinance SMEs, GTS/AI engineering, data, controlsโfor each problem rather than working in a silo.
- AI Governance & Risk Mitigation (~10%)
- Establish and enforce the standards, patterns, and guardrails for how finance AI solutions are built and used, balancing speed with maintainability, security, and responsibleโAI practices.
- Set governance for AI data usage, access, model validation, and human oversight, partnering with risk, compliance, and GTS.
- Identify and mitigate risks specific to AI in financeโmodel drift, output reliability, data quality, and control gapsโand design around model limitations.
- Govern citizenโbuilt and shadow AI within finance, bringing it into a safe, supported framework.
- Ensure AI solutions preserve auditability and compliance across the finance processes they touch.
- People Leadership & Communication (~10%)
- Lead, develop, and grow the team, setting direction, allocating work, coaching, and owning team membersโ growth and performance.
- Build a highโperforming team and raise the bar through mentorship, clear standards, and constructive feedback.
- Attract, hire, and retain strong talent, and build a team culture where people do their best work.
- Foster a culture grounded in customer focus, fast iteration, collaboration, and intellectual honesty.
- Communicate strategy, progress, wins, and lessons learned to finance and firm leadership, tailoring to executive audiences.
- Represent FPO in the firmโs broader AI and engineering community of practice, sharing patterns and lessons, learning from counterparts, and avoiding duplicate work.
Requirements
- Education & Certificates
- Bachelorโs degree required.
- Concentration in a technical or quantitative field, preferred.
- Professional Experience
- 7+ years overall relevant experience.
- Experience across finance/accounting operations, financial systems, and process improvement, with a strong track record of applying AI and automation to real business problems.
- Demonstrated experience setting AI strategy and prioritizing use casesโnot just using the toolsโand translating ambiguous business problems into shipped solutions.
- Experience leading delivery in partnership with engineering or technical teams; able to scope, orchestrate, and drive AI and automation builds through to adoption.
- Handsโon fluency with generative AI tools and conceptsโprompt engineering, agentic workflows, RAG, and document intelligenceโat an applied level; developerโgrade coding not required.
- Experience leading and developing a team, including direct people management or teamโlead responsibility.
- Strong understanding of finance and accounting processes, reporting, data integrity, and controls.
- Experience with AI governance, responsibleโAI practices, data quality, and change management.
- Familiarity with agile delivery and tools such as Jira; SQL and data fluency a plus.
- Background in private equity, financial services, or alternative investment operations preferred.
- Competencies & Attributes
- Builderโs instinct under ambiguityโmeasures progress in working solutions, and can turn a vague business problem into a working prototype quickly.
- Customer obsessionโsits with users, reimagines workflows alongside them, and ships solutions that work in the real world.
- Leverage mindsetโsees every use case as an opportunity to make the next one faster, investing in reusable building blocks that compound across the teamโs work.
- Executive presenceโcan sit across from a senior leader, ask the right questions, push back when needed, and earn trust.
- Intellectual honesty about AIโknows what current models can and cannot do, designs around their limits, and does not confuse demo magic with production reliability.
- Proficiency with generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot, and a conceptual understanding of how large language models work.
- Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills across functions, seniority levels, and the broader firm.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to tailor messaging across finance, technology, and senior leadership audiences.
- Advanced Excel and PowerPoint; strong presentation skills.
- Demonstrated ability to lead and develop both direct reports and indirect or consultant team members.
- Highly organized with strong attention to detail, able to manage multiple priorities in a fastโpaced environment.
Benefits & Compensation
The compensation range for this role is specific to Washington, DC and takes into account a wide range of factors including but not limited to the skill sets required/preferred; prior experience and training; licenses and/or certifications. The anticipated base salary range for this role is $150,000 to $170,000.
In addition to the base salary, the hired professional will enjoy a comprehensive benefits package spanning retirement benefits, health insurance, life insurance and disability, paid time off, paid holidays, family planning benefits and various wellness programs. Additionally, the hired professional may also be eligible to participate in an annual discretionary incentive program, the award of which will be dependent on various factors, including, without limitation, individual and organizational performance.
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