Job Description
Position Title: Senior Strategic Analyst - Network Strategy & Investment
Base Salary: $110,400 to $162,000 annually DOE
Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401k, flexible spending account, paid sick leave and paid time off, parental leave, quarterly performance bonus, training, career growth and education reimbursement programs.
Job Summary
The Senior Strategic Analyst - Network Strategy & Investment helps drive Ziply Fiber's most critical network investment decisions, independently structuring business problems, building financial and analytical models, and synthesizing large datasets into clear, actionable recommendations for senior leadership.
The role spans network expansion, capital allocation, deployment economics, competitive intelligence, value engineering, and long-range network planning. The ideal candidate combines strong financial and strategic problem-solving skills with the technical aptitude to work directly with large-scale network and geospatial data.
This is a high-ownership role for someone who can take a strategic question from initial hypothesis through analysis to executive recommendation with limited direction, drawing on strong prior business judgment, and analytical rigor to proactively drive business improvement.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
The Essential Duties and Responsibilities listed below are a range of duties performed by the employee and not intended to reflect all duties performed.
Network Strategy & Investment Analysis
• Independently structure and evaluate strategic questions related to network investment, expansion, capital allocation, and deployment strategy.
• Build financial models evaluating NPV, IRR, payback, capital efficiency, cost per passing, and other investment-return metrics.
• Develop scenario and sensitivity analyses to evaluate alternative deployment strategies, construction methods, timing assumptions, costs, demand, and risk.
• Develop business cases and investment recommendations for new markets, network expansions, and changes to existing deployment plans.
• Evaluate trade-offs between capital requirements, deployment timing, operational considerations, competitive dynamics, and long-term financial returns.
• Translate complex analytical findings into clear recommendations and decision frameworks for senior leadership.
• Support annual and long-range capital planning and identifying opportunities to improve returns across the network investment portfolio
Network Expansion & Capital Planning
• Identify, prioritize, and evaluate network expansion opportunities using financial, demand, competitive, operational, and geospatial data.
• Develop analytical frameworks to rank markets and build areas based on investment return, strategic value, deployment feasibility, capital efficiency, and risk.
• Evaluate changes to build plans and quantify their impact on capital requirements, timing, passings, and expected financial returns.
• Analyze deployment economics across markets, construction methods, vendors, and network configurations.
• Track approved investments against original assumptions and identify drivers of cost, schedule, or return variance.
• Identify opportunities to improve build sequencing and capital deployment based on changing market conditions and new information.
Value Engineering & Capital Efficiency
• Analyze engineering, construction, labor, material, and vendor cost drivers to identify opportunities to improve capital efficiency.
• Develop and maintain cost benchmarks and unit-economic frameworks across markets and deployment types.
• Evaluate alternative engineering and construction approaches and quantify their impact on cost, schedule, risk, and financial returns.
• Partner with Engineering, Construction, Procurement, Operations, and Finance to develop business cases for cost-reduction initiatives.
• Establish analytical frameworks to prioritize opportunities and track realized savings against expected benefits.
• Perform root-cause analyses of cost and schedule variances and recommend corrective actions.
Competitive & Market Intelligence
• Develop analytical views of competitor network presence, expansion activity, market overlap, and potential implications for Ziply's investment strategy.
• Combine internal and external datasets to identify emerging competitive threats and investment opportunities.
• Assess competitive intensity at the market, neighborhood, and address level where appropriate.
• Translate competitive intelligence into recommendations for market prioritization, build sequencing, and capital allocation.
• Develop repeatable frameworks for incorporating competitive activity into network investment decisions.
Other Duties
• Performs other duties as required to support the business and evolving organization
What Success Looks Like
• Give leadership clear, fact-based visibility into where Ziply should invest, why, expected financial returns, key risks, and available alternatives.
• Independently structure analyses, determine required data, develop models, challenge assumptions, and recommend a course of action.
• Build repeatable analytical frameworks that improve the quality and speed of network investment decisions.
• Develop a deep understanding of Ziply's network economics and connect financial outcomes with engineering and operational decisions.
• Proactively identify opportunities and risks and initiate the analysis required to address them.
• Become a trusted partner to business leaders by combining analytical rigor with practical business judgment.
• Required Qualifications:
• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Business, Engineering, Data Science, Computer Science, Geography/GIS, or another quantitative or analytical field.
• 3 - 7 years of experience in corporate strategy, strategic finance, investment analysis, management consulting, telecommunications, infrastructure, or another capital-intensive industry.
• Demonstrated experience independently structuring complex analytical problems and developing recommendations from incomplete or imperfect information.
• Strong financial modeling skills, including experience with investment cases, NPV/IRR analysis, scenario modeling, sensitivity analysis, and/or capital planning.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel skills and demonstrated ability to build complex analytical models from the ground up.
• Experience working with large datasets and combining multiple data sources to answer complex business questions.
• Ability to translate analytical findings into concise recommendations for senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience creating executive-level presentations.
• Demonstrated ability to identify the next analytical question without being explicitly directed.
• Strong business judgment and ability to balance analytical rigor with real-world operational constraints.
• Ability to independently manage multiple workstreams in a fast-moving environment.
Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience in telecommunications, broadband, infrastructure, utilities, transportation, energy, real estate development, or another capital-intensive industry.
• Experience supporting network expansion, infrastructure investment, market prioritization, capital planning, or value engineering.
• Strong SQL proficiency, including the ability to query and integrate data across multiple sources.
• Experience with Python and analytical libraries such as pandas, geopandas, or comparable tools.
• Experience with GIS platforms such as QGIS, ArcGIS, or equivalent spatial-analysis tools.
• Experience developing financial models incorporating geospatial or address-level data.
• Experience evaluating construction or infrastructure economics, including cost per passing, cost per mile, cost per foot, productivity, vendor economics, or similar unit-cost measures.
• Experience developing executive-level business cases, investment recommendations, or strategic presentations.
• Experience building dashboards, automated analytical workflows, or repeatable decision-support tools.
• MBA, master's degree, or other relevant advanced degree is a plus but not required.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to break problems into structured analyses.
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