The posting
Interested in joining one of Canada’s top performing asset managers? We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Manager, Private Markets Portfolio Operations (PMPO) for an existing vacancy within the Investment Resource Group. This is a hands-on people leadership and operational ownership role responsible for strengthening service continuity, controls, documentation, stakeholder partnership, and scalable execution for private-market and alternative-investment activities supporting CC&L affiliates and their clients. The successful candidate will lead a team of financial operations professionals and work across Affiliates, Investment Operations, Information Services, Operational Risk, Finance, custodians, administrators, and other service providers. The role combines daily operational leadership with the mandate to rebuild resilience, clarify ownership, develop talent, reduce key-person dependency, and improve how PMPO supports a growing and increasingly complex business. Our offices currently operate on a hybrid model with a combination of in-office and remote working days throughout the week.
What You Will Do
People Leadership and Team Resilience
- Lead, coach, and develop Specialists, Analysts, and Senior Analysts; set clear expectations, goals, and development plans and provide timely feedback.
- Plan daily and weekly work, balance competing priorities, review quality and volume, and provide hands-on guidance on complex or unfamiliar matters.
- Build cross-training, succession, and coverage plans; maintain skills matrices and ensure critical activities have trained primary and backup owners.
- Lead recruitment, onboarding, knowledge transfer, and performance management while fostering ownership, urgency, curiosity, and collaboration.
Operational Delivery and Control
- Oversee core PMPO activities, including private-market client onboarding, commitment maintenance, capital calls, subscriptions and redemptions, cash and wire coordination, NAV and position validation, reconciliations, distributions, reporting, tax-related operational inputs, and document management.
- Ensure operational tasks, deadlines, approvals, data, and supporting evidence are complete, accurate, and controlled, including during quarter-end, year-end, tax, and capital-activity peaks.
- Investigate and resolve exceptions across workflows, systems, data, custodians, administrators, and internal teams; assess downstream client, financial, tax, reporting, and reputational impacts.
- Maintain daily and weekly operating rhythms for priorities, service risks, incidents, escalations, and upcoming events, with clear ownership and follow-through.
- Lead business continuity readiness and ensure minimum viable daily outputs and critical-service recovery procedures are documented and tested.
Risk, Governance, and Process Ownership
- Define and maintain PMPO process ownership, RACI assignments, controls, escalation paths, and service expectations in partnership with stakeholders.
- Own remediation of PMPO-related risk findings and distinguish PMPO accountabilities from those of custodians, Affiliates, Information Services, and other operational teams.
- Ensure procedures, process maps, checklists, control evidence, and client-specific requirements are current, accessible, and consistently followed.
- Perform and oversee quality-control reviews and data-integrity checks; identify root causes and implement sustainable corrective actions.
- Escalate material risks promptly and provide concise status, impact, options, ownership, and recommended action to senior leaders.
Stakeholder and Service-Provider Partnership
- Act as the primary operational relationship lead for supported Affiliates and a trusted escalation point for complex private-market matters.
- Establish structured governance with custodians, administrators, technology partners, and internal service teams, including agendas, issue logs, service reviews, and clear communication protocols.
- Partner with Affiliates to understand growth plans, new products, client requirements, and operating-model changes, and translate them into readiness plans and sustainable services.
- Coordinate end-to-end implementation of new or changed processes, ensuring operational, billing, reporting, tax, client-servicing, technology, and control implications are assessed.
Transformation and Continuous Improvement
- Assess workflows end to end and redesign them to reduce manual effort, duplicate hand-offs, control gaps, and key-person dependency.
- Partner with Information Services, reporting, data, and automation teams to prioritize enhancements, develop requirements, execute user acceptance testing, and implement change safely.
- Identify opportunities to use automation and AI responsibly to improve workflow visibility, exception management, knowledge access, documentation, and decision support.
- Develop practical metrics and service indicators covering volumes, timeliness, quality, exceptions, risk, capacity, and improvement benefits.
- Contribute to broader operating-model, platform-renewal, and mid-office/back-office transformation initiatives affecting PMPO.
What You Bring
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Accounting, Information Systems, or a related field; relevant operations, investment, risk, or project-management credentials are valued.
- Approximately 7-10 years of progressive experience in asset management, wealth management, private markets, investment operations, fund administration, custody, or a related financial-services environment.
- Demonstrated people leadership experience, including coaching, workload management, performance expectations, development planning, and building team resilience.
- Practical understanding of private-market or alternative-investment operations, including several of the following: onboarding, commitments, capital calls, subscriptions, redemptions, funding, reconciliations, NAVs, distributions, reporting, and tax-sensitive events.
- Strong operational-risk mindset and experience designing or improving controls, procedures, process maps, RACI models, incident responses, and business-continuity plans.
- Ability to analyze complex end-to-end workflows, identify root causes and downstream impacts, and turn ambiguity into clear ownership and executable plans.
- Experience working with custodians, administrators, technology teams, and senior business stakeholders to resolve issues and deliver change.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical and operational matters to non-technical stakeholders and provide concise executive updates.
- Comfort working under pressure, making sound decisions with incomplete information, and managing multiple deadlines without losing attention to detail.
- High proficiency with Microsoft 365 and workflow or issue-management tools. Experience with investment books of record, portfolio accounting, reporting, reconciliation, CRM, Smartsheet, Jira, data tools, automation, or AI-enabled productivity tools is an asset.
- Completion of the Canadian Securities Course or other relevant investment-industry education is an asset.
The expected base salary range for this position is $105,000–$125,000. The salary range represents our general market target for a fully qualified and experienced individual performing the role. Actual starting salary may fall below or above the midpoint depending on the candidate's relevant experience, skills and qualifications, as well as internal equity considerations. Further questions may be directed to the HR team during the interview process.
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What We Offer At Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group, we’re "invested in our greatest asset, you". Our shared goals reflect what matters most to our people:
- Your community: we foster belonging through collaboration, inclusion and flexibility. Enjoy social events, volunteering and a strong commitment to corporate social responsibility. Our flexible work practices are designed to support work-life balance and provide employees with flexibility in where and how they work
- Your growth: we prioritize your development with meaningful work, continuous learning budgets, paid study days and support for professional designations.
- Recognizing you: your contributions are rewarded with competitive total compensation, retirement savings support, wellness credits, enhanced parental leave, and comprehensive health benefits.
For a closer look at how you can build your career with us, we invite you to explore cclgroup.com.
We are committed to providing an inclusive, accessible recruitment and selection process. We welcome and encourage applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the recruitment and selection process. Please contact [email protected] if you require accommodation.
AI may be used to support certain stages of our screening & recruitment process. These tools support, but do not replace, human judgment and decision-making.
