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Manager, Strategic Initiatives

West Palm Beach, USAOn-sitePosted 1 month ago

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Job type
Full-time
Work mode
On-site
Level
Not listed
Department
Business Operations
Experience
5+ years experience
Posted
Aug 31, 2026

About the role

Essential Job Duties and Responsibilities:

Ownership:

  • Own an assigned area of the Strategic Initiatives portfolio, including the relationship with its business users and the reliability of anything shipped into their hands.
  • Set priorities for that area in partnership with the Director and defend the reasoning behind them.
  • Make day-to-day technical and product decisions independently; escalate architecture or infrastructure calls that affect the wider portfolio rather than deciding those alone.

Building With AI Agents:

  • Use AI coding agents personally to build financial models, internal tools, and product features, staying hands-on rather than moving straight into pure oversight.
  • Set the standard for how the team uses AI agents responsibly: what gets reviewed, what gets tested, and what never gets touched without a second set of eyes (production data, permissions, anything user-facing).
  • Recognize when AI-generated work is subtly wrong, not just obviously broken.

Managing and Developing Associates:

  • Manage one or more Senior Associates: their workload, their growth, and the quality of what they ship.
  • Teach associates how to work with AI coding agents effectively, using real, current work rather than generic training.
  • Review associates' output for judgment, not just correctness: did they solve the actual problem, or just the stated one.

Stakeholder Management:

  • Work directly with business and executive stakeholders, including COO-level leadership, on the status and results of your area.
  • Translate ambiguous, sometimes shifting business asks into a clear plan the team can execute against.
  • Communicate tradeoffs and risk plainly, including when the honest answer is 'not yet' or 'not like that.'

Required Skills, Knowledge and Abilities:

  • Bachelor's degree in Finance, Business, Economics, or a related quantitative field; MBA a plus but not required.
  • 5+ years of experience in finance, strategy, operations, or a related analytical role, including at least a year applying AI tools to real work product.
  • Some experience managing, mentoring, or training junior colleagues, formally or informally.
  • Curiosity: a demonstrated habit of teaching yourself new tools before anyone asks you to, including AI tools specifically.
  • Perseverance: a track record of carrying an ambiguous, difficult problem to a finished result, not handing it off when it gets hard.
  • Critical thinking: the ability to take a messy business problem apart, find the real question, and defend your answer to a skeptic.
  • No prior software engineering background required. What matters is technical fluency good enough to direct AI coding agents, evaluate their output, and teach someone else to do the same.
  • Comfort being personally accountable for the production outcome of something built primarily with AI assistance.
  • Experience with internal software, financial services, lending, or AI systems is a plus but not required.