Director, Network Planning

Conterra Ultra Broadband•Charlotte, NC

About The Position

The Director of Network Planning leads Conterra's future-state network investment strategy, market expansion planning, cluster economics, and proactive growth enablement. This leader serves as the connective tissue across Commercial Operations, Finance, Sales, OSP Engineering, GIS, IT, Delivery, and Operations. The role determines where Conterra should invest, why the investment is warranted, how opportunities should be prioritized, and what downstream teams need to execute. It is a strategic planning and orchestration role rather than a detailed fiber-design position. This Director will report directly to the Chief Network Officer and incorporate itself within the existing Director hierarchy. The expectation is to develop strong partnerships, workflow processes, and establish checks and balances with the goal of iterating continual improvements and execution. Through every primary accountability below, this partnership is not called out but assumed and expected as stated.

Requirements

Relevant telecommunications, broadband infrastructure, network strategy, commercial operations, engineering, or planning experience, leadership experience in a cross-functional or strategic planning environment.
Demonstrated experience building frameworks, operating models, or scalable planning processes.
Strong operations and engineering literacy, executive communication, negotiation, and change-leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Fiber operator, carrier, utility, cable, data center, or hyperscaler environment.
GIS-based planning, spatial analytics, and network modeling.
M&A diligence, dark fiber economics, large strategic pursuits, or capital portfolio management.
AI-enabled workflows, analytics platforms, data governance, and enterprise systems integration.

Responsibilities

Develop market expansion strategies and long-range network growth plans.
Build and maintain market prioritization, readiness, and densification frameworks.
Translate commercial objectives into network investment roadmaps for markets, clusters, buildings, towers, campuses, and data centers.
Own development, governance, and continuous improvement of network enablement playbooks.
Define repeatable workflows for MTU enablement, cluster development, mid-market campaigns, SMB growth, wholesale opportunities, and strategic pursuits.
Establish clear stage gates, decision rights, task ownership, durations, release status, and feedback loops.
Develop cluster-level business cases, probability-weighted scenarios, payback views, and capital-prioritization methods.
Partner with Finance on capital allocation, revenue assumptions, and release of incremental investment.
Provide strategic guidance for OLT, cabinet, splitter, backbone, and route investments without displacing detailed engineering ownership.
Lead scenario planning for build-versus-buy, market entry, capacity investments, dark fiber, wholesale, hyperscaler, and M&A opportunities.
Define criteria for when Network Planning engages Engineering and other downstream resources.
Build decision-support models that allow the team to produce consistent go/no-go and pricing recommendations.
Set business requirements for an integrated planning ecosystem spanning IQGeo, Salesforce, ESRI, Broadband IQ, SQL, SharePoint, reporting, and Copilot.
Champion consistent identifiers, governed datasets, data-quality controls, and durable source-of-truth practices.
Own the accuracy and usability of planning reports and dashboards, including effective fact-checking before executive use.
Build and lead a multidisciplinary planning capability spanning market planning, GIS, analytics, economics, and program execution.
Establish weekly operating rhythms for playbooks, Win Room preparation, market reviews, decisions, and issue escalation.
Remove barriers, navigate competing priorities, and maintain clarity of execution across functions.