Location: New York preferred, but flexible for the right candidate

Reports to: Vice President, Strategic Initiatives

About the Role:

AlphaSense is looking for a Director of M&A Integration to join our team with responsibility for both helping set the strategy and lead the planning and execution for integrating future inorganic growth. In addition to our extraordinary organic growth, AlphaSense is pursuing an M&A strategy to extend its platform and add adjacent content, technology, talent, and other assets and capabilities. We will only realize the full value of these transactions by successfully integrating the businesses we acquire, and that’s where this role comes in!

An ideal candidate will partner closely with our executive team, acquired company management, as well as functional leaders across the business to plan and execute a best-in-class integration strategy and ongoing operational excellence in support of AlphaSense’s overall mission and goals. As part of this evaluation, the Director will assess both companies’ business processes and operations, with the goal of incorporating industry best practices wherever possible.

Who You Are:

• You are a true pro at this. You’ve integrated many acquisitions of lots of different flavors, so nothing surprises you at this point – you’ve seen it all, and have a solid playbook coupled with well-honed intuition that guides you in the many situations that you’ll encounter in the job.
• You are deeply knowledgeable about the financial services sector. While we sell to a more horizontal market of knowledge professionals, a lot of what we acquire has a connection to financial research use cases. Whether you worked in investment banking, private equity or a hedge fund or you were in the financial services practice of a professional services firm, you understand how the industry works and speak the language.
• You have an exceptional work ethic. Closing M&A deals happens in a short and focused period of time, and then your role requires maintaining that pace and intensity to ensure a successful integration and roll-out – all while engaging many stakeholders across both businesses over an extended period of time.
• You are completely comfortable with ambiguity. While others may have clear accountabilities, you have to maneuver in a more uncharted territory – translating high level objectives and priorities into the daily execution agenda. No one is going to tell you what to do, where to focus, and who to contact every day. You’ll need to take the initiative and make independent decisions, and then be able to adapt or change those decisions as the context evolves.
• You are a thoughtful and methodical decision maker. Acquisitions raise countless questions that gradually get answered throughout the integration process. Your role is to provide clear direction, capable of commanding the respect and allegiance of everyone involved. Because of your logical approach, you are able to explain the ‘why’ behind every decision in a way that quickly gains trust – and allows others to offer input and challenge the direction whenever appropriate. You welcome this because better decisions matter.
• You are a trusted collaborator. The answers that provide clarity need to emerge from numerous people across both companies and multiple functions and business units, all in a swirl of urgency, uncertainty, and competing agendas. You need to be the trusted arbiter for aggregating, integrating, and making sense of all of these inputs.
• You work through influence, not through reporting-line authority. While you may have a team helping you during the deal process and the integration, you need the people doing the deeper holistic work of integration to deliver even though they don’t work for you.
• You are detail-oriented and passionate about process. But you also see process as both science and art, and you can discern when to be rigorous and when to relax.
• You are an expert in organizations, and how their component parts operate as an interrelated system. In contributing input to the deal and defining the integration effort, your focus will involve engaging with other leaders on such diverse topics as designing new organization structures, evolving cultures, moving premises, integrating systems, overhauling operations, consolidating products and services, aligning brands, modifying marketing messages, supporting customers, and multiple other business dimensions.
• You are highly empathetic, with exceptional emotional and cultural intelligence. While much of M&A strategy is about markets and money, much of M&A integration is about people – their contributions, their careers, their worries, their complaints, even their identity. You truly care about people and provide them time and space to share, while also helping them move forward constructively.
• You are a motivating storyteller. Especially in the early stages of an M&A integration, you have to be a “sense maker” at a time when things may not make sense. You need to motivate and involve people through existing and imperfect channels of authority, and to inspire people by making the process itself exciting.
• You are an entrepreneur by nature. You know that innovation and value creation can happen not just in new product development but across business models, operations, IT, management processes, and multiple other dimensions as well. And you know that the opportunity to innovate most often comes at points of great change. That’s why you see M&A integration as a way to create deep and enduring value. This excites you beyond anything else – and motivates you to break through walls to create maximum success from each deal.

What You’ll Do:

• Spearhead the integration of acquisitions from pre-closing preparation to day-1 execution to ultimate value realization. You ensure that there is a strong plan, you corral the resources, and make sure the plan is executed well.
• Participate in the acquisition process so your expertise informs the structure and terms of the deal in a way that enables the integration process to deliver the deal’s strategic objectives.
• Participate in the due diligence process, both to identify possible risks and roadblocks and to help inform our integration strategy and process.
• Leverage the acquisition process to deepen your knowledge of the target’s business and to nurture trusted relationships with their key people.
• Plan and execute a Day 1 experience that shares the vision, strategy, and plan in a way that informs, motivates, and engages people across both companies.
• Develop a multi-dimensional integration plan that is tailored to the unique aspects of the acquisition and its strategic objectives – while always embracing the principle that an integration plan should be “as simple as possible and as complex as necessary.”
• Structure and run a governance, decision making, and stakeholder engagement process that ensures the right decisions are made at the right level and at the right time.
• Set up and run the structure, process, systems, and tools – such as clear assignments, common formats for their outputs, disciplined timelines, coordinated meeting schedules, communication mechanisms, and review processes – that enable you to to deliver the integration plan through the choreographed and coordinated effort of multiple people and functions across various locations and time zones.
• Lead the integration process in such a way that business people still run the business and functional leaders still run their functions. The goal is coordination, not control.
• Set up and deliver the data and dashboards that track, analyze, and report on everything that matters to a successful integration – whether milestones, metrics, or money.
• Partner with the Marketing and People Teams to define and deliver a multi-modal communications strategy and plan to ensure that people across both businesses remain informed, motivated, and engaged throughout the integration process.
• Work to form the connective tissue between AlphaSense and the companies we acquire – helping shepherd everyone through the rocky and uncharted territory that the two organizations must cross as they come together.
• In every act and interaction, serve as a consultant, facilitator, communicator, project manager, coach, and bridge builder.

AlphaSense is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to a work environment that supports, inspires, and respects all individuals. All employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling AlphaSense’s commitment to equal employment opportunity. AlphaSense does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, military or veteran status, disability, or any other non-merit factor. This policy applies to every aspect of employment at AlphaSense, including recruitment, hiring, training, advancement, and termination.

In addition, it is the policy of AlphaSense to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances where a particular employee works.

Base Compensation Range*: $175,000 - $225,000

Additional Components: You may also be offered a performance-based bonus, equity, and a generous benefits program.

*For base compensation, we set standard ranges for all US-based roles based on function, level and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies and internal comparables. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including geographic location as well as candidate experience/expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.