Associate Director, Corporate Strategy & Development (all genders)

The role As an Associate Director, Corporate Strategy & Development , you will be a senior member of a small, AI enabled team of highly driven and committed individuals, reporting to the Director Corporate Strategy & Development. This is a high-exposure role, acting as the strategic and analytical engine for our most important decisions in a team that reports directly to the Group CEO . This role balances corporate development / M&A with corporate strategy. You lead projects across both areas as the day-to-day owner and guide a small number of more junior colleagues and internal functional experts. You operate with minimal direction and take projects from a vague problem statement to a CEO-ready recommendation. You also stay hands-on , personally building the models and analysis and preparing the executive-level outputs that drive investment and strategy decisions. What you’ll do • M&A Strategy: Lead M&A projects end to end (owning small and mid-sized transactions independently and partnering with the Director on the largest, transformational deals), from target screening and valuation through due diligence, negotiation preparation, and post-deal integration. Run deal teams day to day, coordinate external advisors and act as the lead with target management teams or their advisors. You are not just a process manager but can form and defend a point of view on whether and why a deal makes strategic sense and present it directly to senior leadership. • Portfolio Optimization: Lead the strategic analysis and recommendations for key portfolio decisions, including potential geo-expansions, new vertical or brand launches or divestments. • Corporate Strategy : Contribute to the development of the Group's mid-term strategy by driving the process, owning the underlying analysis, strategic synthesis, and preparation of strategic documents. • Capital Allocation: Own and develop analytical frameworks and models to support strategic budget allocation and ROI analysis. • Business Unit Strategy: Act as a senior internal consultant, supporting our key business units across geographies on a project-by-project basis to develop their mid-term strategies and solve their most complex challenges. What you’ll bring • Experience: 6+ years of high-performance experience from a top-tier Management Consulting firm, Investment Banking, or a comparable in-house Strategy / Corporate Development team. This includes leading projects or deal teams with minimal supervision. • Process and deal leadership: You have led complex, multi-stakeholder processes to a deadline, coordinating internal functions and external advisors and managing senior counterparties such as target or client management teams. This can come from running M&A transactions (in-house corporate development or advisory) or from leading strategy projects with transaction exposure, such as due diligence, carve-outs, partnerships or market entries. Direct M&A process experience is a strong plus; the ability to learn it quickly is essential. • Leadership and Influence: You have guided and developed more junior colleagues and influenced senior stakeholders, including through negotiation and building rapport with counterparties. • Toolkit: Exceptional qualitative and analytical problem-solving skills. You are hypothesis-driven and can own and structure complex analytical problems from end-to-end. You structure ambiguous problems and set direction for others, not just solve them yourself. You are utilizing AI tools to meaningfully improve your productivity. Ability to build applications with AI coding tools is a plus. • Financial Acumen: Expert-level financial modeling skills are required: you have built and defended complex models used for high-stakes investment or strategic decisions. Valuati