Senior Associate, Operations (AI)

Senior Associate, Operations (AI)

Location: Chicago, IL | Type: Full Time | Setup: Hybrid (4 days onsite) | Experience: 3+ years | Pay: $150K-$200K + bonus

About the Role

We're hiring a Senior Associate to build and roll out the AI tools a private equity firm's deal, operations, and firm teams actually use every day. You'll find the processes that eat up the most time, design AI solutions and automated workflows to fix them, and then make sure people adopt them. Reporting to the Chief Digital Officer, you'll own the work from first conversation to firm-wide rollout.

The firm is a long-duration private investment firm that partners with founder- and family-owned middle-market companies across North America, with a focus on manufactured products and services. Its capital base lets it move quickly and hold businesses for the long term, and that same mindset applies to how it's building AI internally: practical, durable, and tied to real work.

If you've built AI tools that looked great in a demo and then sat unused, this role is built around fixing exactly that. Adoption is half the job.

What You'll Do

• Map repetitive, time-heavy processes across the Investment, Operations, Strategic Partnerships, and Firm Operations teams and turn them into a prioritized list of AI opportunities
• Weigh each opportunity on complexity, cost, and expected impact, with input from leadership on where the biggest needs are
• Design and build AI solutions, agents, and automated workflows that remove the worst friction points in critical firm activities
• Roll new tools out to the right teams, package them for easy access, and fit them into existing workflows
• Keep solutions running reliably after launch
• Create training materials and help lead sessions that build AI awareness and confidence across the firm
• Set up feedback loops to track usage by team and role, then use what you learn to improve the tools over time
• Own the firm's document infrastructure: file taxonomy, folder structure, naming conventions, and formatting standards (roughly 20% of the role)

Qualifications

Experience and Technical Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Business Analytics, or a related field
• 3+ years in business intelligence, AI/automation, or a related role
• Hands-on experience building AI agents, LLM-based tools, and workflow automation on platforms like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft
• Experience building data workflows in Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, OneDrive) and on data platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks
• Working knowledge of data governance, including taxonomy, naming conventions, access controls, and file structure
• A track record of taking a solution from concept to enterprise-wide adoption

How You Work

• Strong project management: you can scope, prioritize, and deliver across multiple teams with competing needs, on time and on budget
• You explain technical ideas clearly to non-technical people and can get them excited to try something new
• Structured, systems-minded problem solver with real attention to detail
• Focused on measurable results, not just shipping features
• Comfortable partnering with teams that have different goals and incentives, and supporting change management along the way

Why Join Us

This is a small, senior group where your work is visible to leadership from day one. You'll have direct access to the people making investment and operating decisions, and the freedom to decide what gets built and how it gets rolled out. The firm thinks in decades, not quarters, so the systems you put in place are meant to last.

If you want to be the person who makes AI genuinely useful inside a respected investment firm, with the ownership to see it through, this is a rare seat to take.