Associate, Portfolio Compliance, Legal, & Risk Management

This role operates as a shared services/enterprise function, supporting compliance investigations, ethics reporting, and risk management across all portfolio companies, subsidiaries, and affiliates held by the organization. The Associate for Portfolio Compliance, Legal & Risk Management is responsible for leading enterprise-wide compliance investigations, ethics reporting, and risk management analysis across a multi-state organization. This role exercises significant discretion and independent judgment on matters of organizational risk, regulatory exposure, employee conduct and family concerns. This position serves as a cross-functional partner to Legal, Human Resources, Quality, Operations and Executive Leadership, providing strategic insight, investigative findings, and risk trend analysis to support informed decision-making and risk mitigation.

Enterprise Shared Services Scope

• Serves as a centralized shared services resource supporting the full enterprise and all affiliated operating companies.
• Provides consistent investigation standards, reporting protocols, and risk trend analysis across multiple business units and legal entities
• Ensures alignment to enterprise policies while accounting for state-by-state regulatory differences and business-specific operating needs.
• Functions as a platform-level advisor to executive leadership across the portfolio

Compliance & Ethics Investigations (Enterprise)

• Conduct investigations across multiple business units, subsidiaries, and portfolio entities to evaluate employee, family, and third-party complaints, including matters reported through EthicsPoint/Navex and other reporting channels.
• Standardizes enterprise-wide investigation procedures, templates, and documentation controls across all operating entities
• Creates repeatable compliance and risk playbooks that scale across the portfolio
• Evaluate allegations involving policy violations, licensing concerns, safety incidents, misconduct, retaliation, and ethical breaches.
• Determine investigative scope, methodology, and documentation standards, exercising independent judgment throughout the process.
• Prepare written investigative summaries, findings, and recommendations for leadership and Legal review.
• Ensure investigations are conducted consistently, objectively, and in accordance with enterprise standards, applicable state requirements, organizational policy, and regulatory expectations.

• Analyze investigation outcomes, incident reports, and complaint data to identify cross-company risk trends, systemic issues, and repeated exposures across the enterprise.
• Develop enterprise dashboards and executive reporting for portfolio leadership.
• Recommend corrective actions, process improvements, training initiatives, and policy enhancements based on identified trends.
• Support insurance, claims, and loss-prevention efforts through investigation support, documentation, and root-cause analysis.

• Support enterprise legal and regulatory tracking across multiple entities, including licensing matters, regulatory inquiries, and documentation controls
• Provide non-certified, paralegal-adjacent support to Legal, including document review, matter tracking, regulatory correspondence support, and file management.
• Assist with licensing-related matters, audits, and regulatory inquiries as assigned.

• Partner with Quality, Operations, HR, and Leadership across the portfolio, driving consistent corrective action and escalation protocols.
• Support quality teams in licensing-related investigations and incident follow-up.
• Provide guidance on best practices related to documentation, reporting, and regulatory preparedness

• Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree or compliance-related training preferred.
• Significant experience in compliance, investigations, risk management, quality, HR, or regulatory environments.
• Experience working in multi-state, highly regulated childcare industry and significant experience with state licensing.
• Demonstrated ability to handle sensitive and confidential matters with professionalism and discretion.
• Strong analytical, writing, and executive-level communication skills.
• Experience with EthicsPoint/Navex or similar ethics reporting systems preferred
• Ability to collaborate cross-functionally