About this role
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