About AlphaSense:

AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by the world's leading companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, our AI-based technology has helped professionals make smarter business decisions by delivering insights from an extensive universe of public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. Our platform is trusted by over 1,800 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 450 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and India. For more information, please visit www.alpha-sense.com.

About the Role: 

To supercharge 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. As important as it is to set the right strategy and target the right acquisitions as part of that strategy, we will only fully realize their value if we can successfully integrate the businesses we acquire. That’s why the Director, M&A Integration role is so essential to our growth.   

M&A is most successful when integration planning is core to the deal itself. That’s when critical questions need to be answered – Is it best to run the acquired company as a stand alone business so we can access a new market? Is it a content set to be accessed through our search, or a technology capability to augment our platform? Is it an ‘acqui-hire’ of highly specialized talent? Because these and other questions define the right integration strategy, this role will also participate in the acquisition itself – including deal structure and due diligence – in addition to the broader remit of integration, partnering with other leaders on everything from Day 1 communications, organizational design, and talent deployment all the way through to product delivery, market positioning, delivery of financial goals, and a multitude of other dimensions across our business. 

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. M&A deals happen in a short and focused period of time, and then once the deal is done your role is to maintain that pace and intensity while engaging multiple stakeholders across both businesses over many months. 
• You are completely comfortable with ambiguity. While others may have clear accountabilities, you have to maneuver where others cannot – 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. 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 bring clarity to chaos. 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.
• 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 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. You know that innovation 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 planning and integration as a way to create deep and enduring value.

What You'll Do:

• 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.
• Serve as the connective tissue between AlphaSense and the companies we acquire – helping shepherd everyone through the rocky and uncharted territory that the two organisations 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.