Director of Pricing Strategy

Director, Pricing Strategy

Indianapolis, Indiana; Tampa, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; Charlotte, NC; Tempe, AZ

Today's logistics marketplace is an ever-changing landscape where you can make your mark. Spot gives you the tools to tackle industry challenges for our partners. Here, initiative, drive, and teamwork form the basis for a rewarding, fast-paced career.

About the Role

The Director of Pricing Strategy is a senior, cross-functional leadership role responsible for owning the full lifecycle of freight pricing, from bid strategy and RFP response through programmatic API-based quoting and real-time margin management. This role sits at the intersection of commercial, data, and technology and serves as the company's authoritative voice on rate strategy, market intelligence, and pricing model architecture.

The ideal candidate combines deep freight industry fluency with hands-on analytical capability and technical literacy to collaborate directly with data science and engineering teams. This is a player-coach role with a mandate to build scalable pricing infrastructure that supports both reactive bid work and proactive revenue optimization.

Core Responsibilities

Bid Management & Commercial Pricing

• Own end-to-end RFP and bid pricing strategy, setting floor/ceiling logic by lane, mode, and customer segment
• Partner with Sales to develop winning bid packages that balance competitiveness with margin integrity
• Build and maintain carrier cost models that feed bid pricing, incorporating fuel, accessorials, and capacity conditions
• Establish pricing governance, approvals, exception handling, and escalation paths for non-standard deals

Market Intelligence & Rate Analytics

• Monitor and synthesize external freight indices, including DAT spot rates, Cass Freight Index, EIA diesel prices, and BLS wage data
• Translate external market signals into actionable pricing adjustments; communicate trends to Sales and Operations leadership
• Maintain competitive rate benchmarks across key lanes and customer verticals
• Develop and maintain a freight cost and revenue forecasting model covering a 2–3-year history, 6–12-month trend direction, and 30–60-day live calibration layers

API & Programmatic Pricing

• Manage integrations with market cost APIs, spot market data feeds, and TMS pricing modules
• Define the business rules and model logic that drive automated quoting and real-time rate responses
• Own the requirements and business logic for any AI-assisted pricing tools or forecasting models built internally

P&L Visibility & Margin Management

• Track cost vs. revenue performance at the load, lane, and customer level
• Partner with Finance to develop pricing-related reporting within the data platform (SQL Server, Databricks)
• Establish margin policies and alert mechanisms for loads trending below threshold

Strategy & Leadership

• Serve as a strategic advisor on pricing positioning, market conditions, and competitive dynamics
• Represent pricing strategy in client-facing meetings, QBRs, and partnership discussions
• Define and report on a monthly pricing performance scorecard for leadership
• Evaluate and recommend third-party tools, data subscriptions, and technology investments that strengthen the pricing function

Qualifications

Required

• 7+ years of experience in freight pricing, rate analysis, or commercial strategy within a 3PL, brokerage, or asset-based carrier
• Deep knowledge of TL and LTL pricing mechanics
• Strong analytical skills; comfortable working in SQL, Excel, or BI tools to build and validate pricing models
• Track record of collaborating directly with sales, operations, and technology teams in a cross-functional capacity
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate complex pricing analysis into an executive-ready narrative

Preferred

• Experience with freight data platforms or indices (DAT, Cass, Greenscreens, FreightWaves SONAR)
• Familiarity with Databricks, Sigma, or similar modern data stack tools
• Exposure to machine learning or statistical forecasting models applied to freight pricing
• Experience in a TMS environment (TMW, McLeod, MercuryGate, or similar)

Spot Freight, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Spot Freight is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a disability, you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact our Human Resources team to notify us of your request. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.