Director, Data & AI — Portfolio Value Creation ($5B Mid-Market Private Equity)

A generalist mid-market private equity firm with roughly $5B in AUM is hiring a Director to lead its data and AI agenda, with a heavy emphasis on driving value across the portfolio. This is a builder-operator role: stand up the firm’s data and AI capabilities, then point them at the companies the firm owns. You’ll work directly with deal teams and management teams to turn AI from a talking point into margin, growth, and better decisions inside portfolio businesses. The data and AI mandate sits within the GP, with senior sponsorship, and exists to make portfolio companies more valuable. You’d be the first dedicated hire owning it, with room to define how the firm uses AI for years.

What You’ll Own

• Run the firm’s portfolio value-creation effort on data and AI. Diagnose where AI can move EBITDA across the portfolio, prioritize the opportunities, and work alongside management teams to ship them.
• Build the firm’s internal data and AI capability from scratch — the platform, the tooling, and the playbooks deal teams and portfolio companies actually use.
• Partner with management teams at portfolio companies to embed AI into their operations: revenue, cost, pricing, customer, and back-office workflows where it pays for itself.
• Build a system that lets new opportunities be tested against the firm’s full deal history — prior memos, performance data, and external sources — so deal teams get queryable historical context on every situation.
• Stand up cloud-native infrastructure, modern data warehousing, and an LLM-ready data layer across a firm that doesn’t have one today.
• Develop a repeatable value-creation playbook so that each new portfolio company benefits from what worked at the last, rather than starting from scratch.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in AI, Data Science, and engineering.
• A track record combining data/AI engineering with real operating impact — ideally inside or alongside portfolio companies, an operating role at a PE-backed business, a fintech or data platform, or a top consulting AI practice.
• Hands-on across the modern AI stack: LLM integration (Claude, OpenAI), retrieval architectures, vector stores, data warehousing (Snowflake or equivalent), and the engineering to get to production.
• Demonstrated experience using AI or data to drive measurable business outcomes — margin, growth, or productivity you can point to.
• Private equity or investment-industry fluency, and the credibility to advise both deal teams and the management team.
• Based in or willing to relocate to New York. On-site