Your Team Responsibilities

MSCI is seeking an experienced technical leader to architect, build, and govern the geospatial and physical risk platform infrastructure that will enable MSCI's climate risk, nature risk, and geospatial solutions for the next 3-5 years. This Executive Director will make critical technology and platform architecture decisions that determine how MSCI delivers scalable, reliable, and high-performance physical climate risk analytics to thousands of investors, banks, and insurers globally.

This is a strategic technical leadership role requiring deep expertise in geospatial systems, distributed data platforms, and the ability to translate diverse research requirements into unified platform capabilities. You will work at the intersection of climate science, geospatial technology, and enterprise data engineering—making architectural decisions today that enable product innovations 2-3 years out while ensuring operational excellence for current solutions.

This role is part of MSCI's Platform & Governance function, serving as the technical foundation that enables multiple product teams across Investment Research to deliver differentiated climate and nature risk solutions. You will lead a team of XXX geospatial engineers, platform engineers, data engineers, and technical program managers, partnering intensively with Research leadership to ensure the platform anticipates and enables research innovation while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability, performance, and governance standards.

Your Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the technical architecture for MSCI's geospatial and physical risk platform, making strategic build-vs-buy decisions and establishing technical standards that enable current operations while anticipating requirements 2-3 years out.
• Establish design patterns for geospatial data pipelines, spatial analytics workflows, and API contracts that enable rapid development and deployment of new physical risk models and client-facing analytics.
• Partner with Research leadership to translate research innovations into scalable platform capabilities, establishing clear service-level agreements and creating reusable components that accelerate research productivity while maintaining production reliability standards.
• Lead cross-functional engineering partnerships (platform, data engineering, cloud operations, AI/ML teams) to implement platform capabilities, translating research requirements into technical specifications, data schemas, and performance benchmarks while integrating advanced analytics capabilities.
• Identify opportunities to leverage emerging technologies including AI/ML for geospatial analytics, staying current with technology and climate data landscapes while driving proof-of-concepts that test new approaches to physical risk modeling challenges.
• Establish comprehensive data governance frameworks including quality standards, metadata, provenance tracking, versioning, and technical controls that ensure data integrity while enabling rapid research iteration.
• Set technical direction and establish engineering excellence standards for the platform team, fostering a culture of innovation balanced with operational discipline while developing technical talent.
• Engage with sophisticated clients on technical architecture questions—explaining platform capabilities, data provenance, computational methodologies, and integration patterns in ways that build confidence and enable informed decision-making.
• Participate in joint governance with Investment Research leadership to prioritize platform development, balancing competing demands from multiple product teams and ensuring platform investments deliver maximum strategic value.
• Drive platform cost optimization and efficiency, ensuring MSCI can scale to serve growing data volumes and user bases while maintaining appropriate cost structures and performance SLAs.

Your skills and experience that will help you excel

• 10+ years building or leading geospatial platforms, physical risk modeling infrastructure, catastrophe modeling systems, or similar large-scale spatial data platforms at financial institutions, insurance companies, specialized vendors (RMS, AIR, CoreLogic).
• Deep technical expertise in geospatial system including spatial databases, GIS tools and processing frameworks, and cloud-based geospatial services. Hands-on experience with technologies such as PostGIS, GDAL, GeoPandas, and major cloud platforms.
• Strong understanding of physical risk modeling methodologies and how they translate into computational workflows—including hazard modeling, exposure analysis, vulnerability functions, damage estimation, and uncertainty quantification.
• Proven track record making architectural decisions for data-intensive systems that scaled successfully demonstrating ability to balance technical trade-offs around cost, performance, reliability, flexibility, and time-to-market.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with both research/science teams and engineering teams—speaking both languages, bridging cultural differences, and building collaborative relationships that drive execution.
• Experience translating business and research requirements into technical specifications while balancing scientific accuracy, engineering pragmatism, and commercial viability.
• Understanding of how financial institutions use physical climate risk data in their systems and workflows — including credit risk models, underwriting systems, portfolio analytics platforms, and regulatory reporting infrastructure.
• Leadership experience setting technical direction, establishing engineering standards, and developing talent while maintaining technical credibility.
• Exceptional cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders across research, product, engineering, and commercial teams.

Desired Experience

• Advanced degree in climate science, geospatial sciences, computer science, computational engineering, earth sciences, or related quantitative field. PhD a plus but not required if offset by substantial applied platform engineering experience. Combination of scientific domain expertise and hands-on technical skills ideal.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and data engineering at scale.
• Prior experience leading platform teams that serve multiple internal product teams in complex, matrixed organizations.
• Familiarity with catastrophe modeling architectures (RMS, AIR, Moody's RMS) or similar physical risk platforms highly valued.

About MSCI

What we offer you

• Transparent compensation schemes and comprehensive employee benefits, tailored to your location, ensuring your financial security, health, and overall wellbeing.

• Flexible working arrangements, advanced technology, and collaborative workspaces.

• A culture of high performance and innovation where we experiment with new ideas and take responsibility for achieving results.

• A global network of talented colleagues, who inspire, support, and share their expertise to innovate and deliver for our clients.

• Global Orientation program to kickstart your journey, followed by access to our Learning@MSCI platform, LinkedIn Learning Pro and tailored learning opportunities for ongoing skills development.

• Multi-directional career paths that offer professional growth and development through new challenges, internal mobility and expanded roles.

• We actively nurture an environment that builds a sense of inclusion belonging and connection, including eight Employee Resource Groups. All Abilities, Asian Support Network, Black Leadership Network, Climate Action Network, Hola! MSCI, Pride & Allies, Women in Tech, and Women’s Leadership Forum.

At MSCI we are passionate about what we do, and we are inspired by our purpose – to power better investment decisions. You’ll be part of an industry-leading network of creative, curious, and entrepreneurial pioneers. This is a space where you can challenge yourself, set new standards and perform beyond expectations for yourself, our clients, and our industry.

MSCI is a leading provider of critical decision support tools and services for the global investment community. With over 50 years of expertise in research, data, and technology, we power better investment decisions by enabling clients to understand and analyze key drivers of risk and return and confidently build more effective portfolios. We create industry-leading research-enhanced solutions that clients use to gain insight into and improve transparency across the investment process.

MSCI Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. It is the policy of the firm to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, disability, marital and civil partnership/union status, pregnancy (including unlawful discrimination on the basis of a legally protected parental leave), veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. MSCI is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, please email [email protected] and indicate the specifics of the assistance needed. Please note, this e-mail is intended only for individuals who are requesting a reasonable workplace accommodation; it is not intended for other inquiries.

To all recruitment agencies

MSCI does not accept unsolicited CVs/Resumes. Please do not forward CVs/Resumes to any MSCI employee, location, or website. MSCI is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited CVs/Resumes.

Note on recruitment scams

We are aware of recruitment scams where fraudsters impersonating MSCI personnel may try and elicit personal information from job seekers. Read our full note on careers.msci.com