Director, Competitive Intelligence

Ankura is a team of excellence founded on innovation and growth.

The Digital Transformation practice is part of the Global Solutions Advisory business group, which is one of five strategic business groups at Ankura

Practice Overview

Ankura Consulting Group is recognized as one of the five fastest-growing consulting companies, with 2,500 employees across 32 offices in 4 continents. The Company provides services to its client on expert witness, bankruptcy and corporate restructuring, litigation support, forensic accounting, geopolitical risk assessment, and general management consulting services. Ankura Consulting Group's headquarters is based in Washington, USA.

Ankura's Digital Transformation practice helps clients modernize their organizations by leveraging data, analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence to drive measurable business outcomes. Within this practice, our Competitive Intelligence capability helps clients turn market, pricing, and customer data into decisions that grow revenue, protect margin, and strengthen enterprise value.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Director to lead the design and hands-on delivery of Competitive Intelligence solutions across multiple client engagements. This is a builder role, not a strategy-only role: the ideal candidate has personally built pricing models, elasticity curves, and forecasting pipelines — writing the queries, building the models, and validating the numbers. The Director will combine that hands-on technical depth with delivery ownership, solution design, and team leadership, acting as a trusted advisor to client stakeholders while remaining able to get into the data personally when engagements demand it.

Responsibilities

• Personally build and validate pricing, elasticity, and demand models - using tools such as Python or R, SQL, and statistical/econometric or machine learning techniques.
• Define and own the solution design for Competitive Intelligence engagements, including dynamic and elastic pricing models, competitor and market monitoring, and customer/segment analytics.
• Lead delivery of pricing and market intelligence programs for clients, tying each initiative to measurable business outcomes (revenue, margin, operating efficiency, working capital).
• Design, build, and continuously recalibrate price elasticity models by SKU, segment, and geography — including cross-elasticity and scenario simulation — to support data-driven pricing and promotion decisions.
• Build or directly oversee the technical build of competitor price/promotion scraping and monitoring pipelines, supplier and sourcing intelligence feeds, and demand/supply forecasting models.
• Apply and evaluate machine learning and AI techniques (e.g., demand forecasting models, customer segmentation/clustering, propensity and churn models, NLP-based market signal extraction) where they improve on traditional analytics.
• Establish reference architectures, delivery standards, and best practices for Competitive Intelligence solutions built on the firm's Enterprise Data Platform.
• Estimate, plan, and govern delivery across multiple client engagements and workstreams.
• Partner with client stakeholders to align Competitive Intelligence roadmaps with business objectives and timelines.
• Mentor, coach, and develop data scientists, analysts, and technical leads, staying hands-on enough to review code, models, and analysis rather than only reviewing slides.
• Ensure solutions meet expectations for analytical rigor, accuracy, scalability, and time-to-value.

• Support pre-sales and business development activities, including hands-on proof-of-concept analysis, solution design, technical estimates, and client pitches.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in pricing, revenue management, market/competitive intelligence, or advanced analytics, with significant leadership responsibility — including recent, genuinely hands-on technical work, not purely oversight.
• Bachelors in Engineering, computer science preferred.

• Certification in cloud platform or relevant data platforms
• Demonstrated, hands-on track record of having personally built dynamic pricing, price elasticity, demand forecasting, or revenue management models — able to speak to the data, methodology, and code, not just the resulting recommendations.
• Proficiency in a data science/analytics stack such as Python or R, SQL, and common ML/statistics libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, pandas, statsmodels), sufficient to build or debug models directly.
• Working knowledge of applied machine learning and AI techniques relevant to pricing and market intelligence — forecasting, clustering/segmentation, propensity modeling, and increasingly, LLM-based tools for market/text signal extraction.
• Comfort working directly in data platforms and analytics tooling (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, or equivalents), including writing and reviewing data pipelines, not only architecting them.
• Demonstrated ability to estimate, plan, and govern complex delivery programs.
• Strong understanding of data architecture, governance, and security principles as they relate to market and pricing data.
• Excellent communication skills and experience in senior, client-facing roles, including presenting to executive audiences — balanced with genuine willingness to be in the data day-to-day.
• Consulting experience in a front-ending, client-facing role: understanding and clarifying client requirements, setting and managing expectations, proactively anticipating needs and risks, and communicating clearly and effectively with stakeholders at all levels.
• Strong business acumen and results-oriented mindset, with a track record of connecting hands-on analytics work to business outcomes.
• Preferred to have experience leading multi-team or multi-vendor delivery models.
• Preferred to have experience working with private equity firms or portfolio companies.
• Preferred to have a graduate degree or equivalent depth in a quantitative field (statistics, economics, operations research, data science, or similar).
• Cloud or platform certifications (any major provider) is preferred.
• Must be fluent in English.

Ankura is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against based on disability. Equal Employment Opportunity Posters, if you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation to search for a job opening, submit an online application, or participate in an interview/assessment, please email [email protected] or call toll-free +1.312-583-2122. This email and phone number are created exclusively to assist disabled job seekers whose disability prevents them from being able to apply online. Only messages left for this purpose will be returned. Messages left for other purposes, such as following up on an application or technical issues unrelated to a disability, will not receive a response.