Head of Core Investment Operations

This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious operations leader to shape and lead a critical part of Vanguard Personal Investor’s operating model. As Head of Core Investment Operations, you will take ownership of the teams and processes that sit at the heart of our client and investment platform experience across Trading, Portfolio Management, Payments, and Liquidity. You will play a pivotal role in strengthening operational performance, protecting client assets, enhancing controls, and helping Vanguard continue to deliver outstanding outcomes as the business grows.

This role offers the opportunity to set direction, build capability, and lead meaningful change across a high-impact operational environment. You will bring energy, pace, and judgment to the way we execute, improve, and transform, creating a culture of ownership, curiosity, strong controls, and continuous improvement. Working closely with internal teams and outsourced providers, you will ensure operational change is delivered safely, sustainably, and with clear control over client, regulatory, and service impacts.

We are looking for someone who thrives in a fast-paced regulated environment, can bring clarity to complexity, and is motivated by the chance to make a positive difference to service quality, operational resilience, control effectiveness, and change delivery.

Key Duties:

• Hires, evaluates, and supervises crew. Provides guidance and training as necessary to develop crew. Sets performance standards, reviews performance, and makes informed compensation decisions in accordance with all applicable Human Resources policies and procedures.
• Leads day-to-day operations across Trading, Portfolio Management, Payments, and Liquidity, ensuring effective execution, issue management, service performance, and operational resilience.
• Owns and strengthens the control environment across regulated operational activities, including control identification, design, implementation, testing, and ongoing effectiveness, with appropriate focus on CASS-related obligations and client asset protection.
• Serves as senior escalation point for complex operational, control, and client-impacting matters, ensuring timely resolution, clear communication, and effective mitigation of risks arising across trading, portfolio activity, cash movement, payments, and liquidity processes.
• Leads development and delivery of operational performance, risk, and control reporting, ensuring meaningful insight into service levels, exceptions, incidents, reconciliations, liquidity indicators, and emerging risks.
• Drives an ambitious continuous improvement agenda across operational processes, using data, colleague insight, risk events, and client outcomes to simplify activity, strengthen controls, and improve service quality.
• Leads operational change agendas with confidence and discipline, ensuring change is appropriately planned, risk assessed, governed, tested, embedded, and monitored, with clear accountability for readiness and post-implementation outcomes.
• Builds strong working relationships with senior internal stakeholders, outsourced service providers, and second- and third-line partners to ensure operational delivery, governance, and control expectations are clearly understood and consistently met.
• Represents Vanguard externally at industry forums and working committees.
• Maintains strong awareness of relevant regulatory, industry, and operational developments, including CASS, payments, trading, market operations, liquidity, and outsourcing expectations, and determines applicability to the operation.
• Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned.