CIM | Community Investment Management

Chief Operating Officer

San Francisco

Community Investment Management (CIM) is looking for a Chief Operating Officer to join our team. CIM is a global institutional impact investment manager that provides strategic debt funding to scale and demonstrate responsible innovation in lending to underserved borrowers in the United States and emerging markets. Our work aims to advance financial inclusion by partnering with select tech-enabled lending partners, improve financial health and drive widespread adoption of such fintech innovation by the financial mainstream.

Position Summary

CIM seeks a seasoned executive who can join our team in leading the firm to and through successful, rapid scale. The COO has three key areas of focus: Planning, Process, and People.

• Planning: The COO is charged with project planning across functions relating to the growth of the firm. This requires detail-orientation and follow-through. This role will have significant responsibility for determining the road map to success, and then ensuring that the firm follows that road map accordingly.
• Process: As CIM scales and expands its presence to other geographies, the firm requires well-articulated processes that are accessible and consistently implemented. The continued design, documentation, roll-out, and maintenance of such processes will be essential to this role.
• People: The COO will be responsible for managing certain members of the leadership team at CIM, as well as helping the team thoughtfully grow its headcount. This requires a blend of earned respect, experience, willingness to lead change, and humility. Kindness and direct communication matter in this role, as does a commitment to the organization’s culture.

The COO is a new position at CIM. Key responsibilities of the COO are currently being handled by other senior leaders, in particular the Managing Partner. The successful COO will embrace these responsibilities, allowing the rest of the team to deepen their own focus areas. As such, it will be important for the COO to quickly establish a rapport with the Managing Partner and other members of the team to help them best leverage their time.

Responsibilities will include:

• Develop, maintain, and report on operating plan, budget, and milestones for the organization. Implement roll out of new products, platforms, and offices.
• Establish and operationalize various new corporate entities and investment vehicles in international geographies to accommodate the firm’s global footprint and optimize investment returns (with a particular focus on tax, legal, and regulatory structuring). Create comparisons between various approaches, gain consensus as to optimal design.
• Create and implement structures that promote the firm’s values around performance excellence and accountability. This will include establishing performance review processes and formalizing reporting structures to increase clarity and efficiency.
• Working closely with the CTO to establish a technology roadmap and ensure milestones and required resources have been identified.
• Ensure that the corporate model is a sufficiently robust tool to understand and project the key levers of the business.
• Manage a variety of functions – both internal to the firm and external with service providers (such functions to include audit and finance, systems, and technology, legal and compliance, reporting, human resources and others) and timelines across functions.

The ideal candidate:

Successful candidates for this role should be experienced designers, builders, and implementers of systems and processes that have facilitated the successful growth of an asset management firm. The ability to employ structures, with heart, that help the organization grow while doubling down on its mission, is key. The impact of this position is bigger than the sum of its particular responsibilities, and the ideal candidate will have more than just a list of skills that ‘check the box’. Intellectual curiosity is essential, and in filling this role we are more concerned with a candidate’s capabilities than any singular experience. CIM is looking for someone who possesses sufficient experience to initiate high-impact projects, someone with sufficient credibility to build trust with the team and with service providers, and someone with sufficient vision to determine a course of action for an array of key business functions.

Particular experience and qualities for the COO include:

• Track record of leading rapid growth at an asset management firm
• Highly organized leader, with a research mindset and a focus on results
• Experience leading functional areas including compliance, legal, HR, tax, audit, and technology
• Detail-oriented, without losing focus on the big picture
• Comfortable working to highest standards of performance and ethical behavior
• Committed to building relationships across the team in concert with the firm’s core values
• Excited to work in a small, fluid, ambitious, and highly collaborative team with a high degree of autonomy, self-motivation, and discipline
• Comfortable communicating clearly and effectively in team discussions and sharing own opinion
• Mission driven, with a deep commitment to supporting the culture of the organization

This role will be based in our San Francisco office, though we offer a fair degree of flexibility regarding remote work.

If you are interested in learning more about the role or applying, please send your resume and an email cover letter to jobs@cim-llc.com.

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