Director, Network Strategy & Optimization

Job Description

Overview

The Director, Network Strategy & Optimization is responsible for governing the health, profitability, and long-term evolution of OneRail’s delivery marketplace.

The mission of the Director, Network Strategy & Optimization is to maximize the economic performance, supply balance, service quality, scalability, and resilience of OneRail’s courier network by decisions orchestrating across Transportation, Technology, Customer Success, Finance/Audit & Pay, Shippers, and Data Science/AI.

This role sits at the center of Transportation, Finance, Audit, Data Science, Product, and Customer Success, serving as the strategic decision-maker that balances customer outcomes, carrier experience, operational performance, and company margin.

You’ll own the analytical framework used to make network decisions—from carrier utilization and pricing strategy to geographic expansion, customer profitability, and marketplace balance. This role will identify opportunities to strengthen OneRail’s independent carrier network, reduce reliance on third-party marketplaces, and ensure the network scales in a sustainable, profitable way.

This equates to part strategy, analytics, operations, and business leadership.

Network Strategy & Governance

• Own the strategic governance of OneRail’s delivery network, ensuring decisions optimize customer service, carrier health, and company profitability, while reducing and avoiding “supply concentration” with any one carrier partner.
• Partner with the Data Science team to leverage predictive models and analytical frameworks that inform network strategy.
• Develop the frameworks used to evaluate network performance across all markets, balancing delivery quality, margin, carrier utilization, and growth.
• Drive initiatives that expand and strengthen OneRail’s unit economics, and proprietary carrier network, while balancing utilization of its third-party delivery providers.
• Recommend network investments, carrier recruitment strategies, geographic expansion, and market optimization plans based on data-driven analysis.
• Evaluate customer-specific network strategies to ensure the right balance of service levels, operational efficiency, and financial performance.
• Analyze market trends and integration capabilities needed to enhance the capabilities of OneRail’s proprietary carrier network.
• Own the process of receiving and analyzing API release notes; lead the prioritization of carrier API updates, ensuring OneRail the maximum utilization of carrier capabilities (i.e. Scanning, age verification geo, etc.)

Marketplace & Financial Optimization

• Partner with Finance to understand delivery economics, customer profitability, contribution margin, carrier costs, and marketplace performance – including the cost of “underperformance” through SLA penalties, loss runs, and direct customer intent (i.e. NPS, LTR, etc.).
• Analyze pricing, incentives, and routing decisions to maximize contribution margin while maintaining exceptional customer experience.
• Evaluate tradeoffs between service levels, cost, carrier availability, penalties, loss runs, and customer commitments.
• Support financial planning by forecasting the operational and financial impact of network changes.
• Ensure network decisions align with long-term business objectives and profitability targets.
• Drive cross-functional alignment across Transportation, Date Science, Audit/Pay/Finance, and Sales to ensure marketplace costs and customer pricing support business objectives, commercial terms, and align with industry expectations.

Data & Decision Intelligence

• Partner with Data Science to develop predictive models, simulations, and decision-support tools that improve marketplace performance.
• Identify and prioritize shippers/geographies to move from singular “hot shot” or “gig small batch” deliveries, to batched routes.
• Drive the implementation and rollout of proprietary OneRail routing capabilities (OmniStar) driving improvements to gross margin, and carrier performance.
• Establish KPIs that measure marketplace health, carrier concentration, geographic coverage, profitability, customer experience, and delivery performance.
• Build executive dashboards and reporting that provide visibility into network trends and emerging risks.
• Leverage data to proactively identify opportunities before they impact customers or operations.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as the strategic link between Transportation, Finance, Audit & Pay, Data Science, Product, Customer Success, and Executive Leadership.
• Translate complex operational and financial data into recommendations that drive business decisions.
• Partner with Product to influence marketplace capabilities, carrier tooling, and platform enhancements.
• Collaborate with Audit to ensure network policies, financial controls, and operational governance are consistently followed.
• Support Customer Success by developing network strategies that improve customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.

Continuous Improvement

• Develop repeatable frameworks for evaluating new customers, markets, carrier partners, and expansion opportunities.
• Identify operational inefficiencies and recommend process improvements that increase automation and scalability.
• Lead strategic initiatives that improve marketplace resilience and reduce operational risk.
• Establish governance processes that ensure decisions are data-driven, measurable, and aligned across departments.
• Work with integrations to drive roadmap decisions ensuring OneRail takes a proactive approach to upgrades across our carrier network

What Success Looks Like

• OneRail’s marketplace consistently delivers the right balance of customer experience, carrier satisfaction, and financial performance.
• Transportation pricing is on-demand or governed by an SLA, ensuring Business Development and Solutions can meet customer and prospective customer timeslines.
• Network decisions are guided by data, standardized frameworks, and measurable business outcomes rather than reactive operational decisions.
• Dependence on third-party marketplaces decreases as the proprietary carrier network grows in both coverage and quality.
• Leadership has clear visibility into marketplace health through actionable dashboards and executive reporting.
• Strategic recommendations directly influence pricing, carrier strategy, customer onboarding, and product roadmap decisions.
• Cross-functional teams rely on this role as the trusted advisor for marketplace strategy and operational governance.

About OneRail

OneRail is a leading omnichannel fulfillment solution pairing best-in-class software with logistics as a service to provide dependability and speed to help businesses meet their delivery promise. With a real-time connected network of 12 million drivers, OneRail matches the right vehicle for the right delivery so brands lower expenses and increase capacity to rapidly scale their businesses. This people-plus-platform approach features a ²⁴⁄₇ USA-based exceptions team who maintain a 98% on-time delivery rate. By optimizing fulfillment processes, reducing costs and improving order accuracy with store-shelf-to-doorstep visibility, OneRail is committed to empowering clients and improving the customer experience.

OneRail was named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ two years in a row, was ranked 19th in the 2025 FreightTech 25, named for the fifth year in a row to the FreightTech 100, was honored as one of Inc. magazine’s Best Workplaces 2023, was listed on Forbes’ lists of America’s Best Startup Employers for the last three years, was named to the Inc. 5000 two years in a row and was selected as the Last Mile Company of the Year for the 2024 SupplyTech Breakthrough Awards. To learn more about OneRail, visit OneRail.com.