Senior Director, Strategy & Business Development

Department

Strategy & Business Development (BD) helps author and orchestrate the enterprise strategy and provides the analytical capabilities required to drive it forward. The team owns the strategic planning process, manages the organization's market intelligence capability, leads key cross-functional initiatives, and runs Business Development and Partnerships. Working end-to-end across all departments, Strategy & BD is positioned to help Success Academy deliver its most ambitious goals.

The Opportunity

We are seeking an experienced Strategy and Business Development leader to serve as a strategic architect and effective operator. This role will tackle the organization’s most complex and highest-priority challenges, moving between enterprise-level strategy and tactical program execution. With an enterprise-wide scope, you will play a leading role in building the strategic capabilities, systems, and processes that will enable Success Academy to deliver on its ambition to scale world-class schools and reimagine public education.

The ideal candidate combines rigorous strategic thinking, strong analytical horsepower, and exceptional communication skills: someone who can take a complex problem, develop a data-driven solution, and then effectively implement it across the organization, influencing others to drive change. To be effective in this role, you will need to be able to navigate ambiguity, solve problems like an owner, and move complex work forward quickly.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape the enterprise agenda. Serve as a trusted thought partner to senior leaders—helping shape, pressure-test, and drive the strategic priorities of the network.

• Build systematic solutions. Develop the strategic operating cadences the network runs on. Establish and own strategic planning processes and structures that will enable the organization to operate with speed as it scales.

• Solve the hardest cross-functional problems. Lead structured problem-solving on the network's most consequential challenges. Bring structure to ambiguous issues, drive the analysis, and ensure successful execution and sustainment.

• Deliver business insights and decision support. Proactively surface trends and opportunities, arming executive leadership with actionable insights.

• Operationalize market and competitive intelligence. Contextualize the external landscape in which Success Academy operates. Systematically surface key insights to drive enterprise strategy and inform key decisions.

• Source partnership opportunities. Bring outside-in perspective to the organization. Identify, vet, and structure partnerships that solve internal problems and bring new capabilities to the enterprise.

• Elevate and enhance work with AI. Find where AI can raise the quality and speed of the team's work, and build it into how we analyze, communicate, and support decisions.

Requirements

• A world-class analytical foundation. 10+ years of experience, ideally including time at a top-tier strategy consulting firm or comparable environment. In-house strategy or business development experience is highly valued.

• Exceptional problem-solving. You break down hard, ambiguous problems quickly, see the connections others miss, and bring structure where there was none.

• Independent ownership. A track record of driving complex initiatives from definition through implementation, with high agency and excellent execution.

• Executive communication. You distill complex, multi-source information into clear and synthesized recommendations. Presentation and delivery build trust and confidence with executive audiences.

• Partnership development acumen. Able to scan the external ecosystem to source, vet, and structure potential partnerships with financial and strategic rigor. A compelling representative of Success Academy to external parties—able to articulate our needs and frame partnership opportunities in a way that resonates.

• Fluency with the modern strategy toolkit. Strong quantitative and data-visualization skills, and genuine enthusiasm for using AI to elevate your work.

• High drive, low ego. Pairs ambition and intensity with humility—no task too small, willing to roll up sleeves and pitch in wherever needed to drive change.

• Location. NYC-based or willing to relocate; hybrid, 3 days/week in the Manhattan office.