Multiple openings, entry-level through senior.

Our Work

Most of the cities we work for own more infrastructure in the form of streets, water, and wastewater lines than their revenue can maintain. But most of the time, they don't realize it, or if they do – they cannot quantify it. It generally shows up as deferred maintenance, a capital budget that seems to cover less every year, enterprise funds subsidizing the general fund, and a council that keeps approving greenfield subdivisions because growth was the answer for the past 70 years. The bill for the last couple of generations of development is coming due in the next. Many of the places we work have a planner or two, an engineer on retainer, and a city manager or finance director trying to do three jobs.

Verdunity gets hired to put real numbers to that problem and then help the City do something about it. We measure what each part of a city produces against what it costs to serve; we show councils and residents what the math actually says, and we write the plans, codes, and capital strategies that shift the trajectory. Since 2011, we have done that work in cities of every size across Texas and beyond, and demand is growing faster than our team.

The numbers are the part our clients can’t get anywhere else, and our fiscal analysis is where they get crunched. We are hiring analysts to parse the data, extract the lessons, and tell the story. The work runs from executing a documented model correctly and on schedule up to writing the method that model runs on, and we are hiring across that whole range rather than at one point on it. This posting is for multiple positions at multiple levels.

What you would actually do

You would work on land use fiscal analyses, revenue and land value studies, asset analysis, and the analytical underpinning for plans and code rewrites, usually a few projects at a time, reporting directly to the Fiscal Analysis Practice Lead and alongside the planners who carry the findings into planning work.

Here is roughly how a project runs.

Getting and cleaning the data. You start from the existing instructions and get as far as you can on your own. Send the data request to the city, then track down parcel and valuation files, land use, budgets, capital improvement plans, and infrastructure records. Cities differ enormously in what they keep and how quickly it arrives. Standardize the fields, verify the integrity, join what needs joining, and organize it so the team can work with it. Raise the problems you find early instead of guessing, then carry the answer into the next project without being told it applies. 

The analysis. You run the property tax and land use models. Early on that means executing a documented process exactly and on schedule, and catching the places where this city's data does not behave the way the last one's did. Further along it means recognizing when the documented process no longer fits the city in front of you and changing it on purpose. Either way the work is to figure out what is distinct about this place: what the data says about how it makes and spends money, and what matters most for people here to understand. You check in with the Practice Lead throughout. 

Communicating the findings. Data visualization and data storytelling are most of this. Maps, charts, tables, online maps, and the written analysis around them. Most of the GIS, database, and statistical work lands here. So does the design work, because a finding that nobody can follow does not change anything, and the audience is usually a council member or a city manager reading it once. Sometimes you build to a specification someone hands you, and increasingly to one you choose because you understand what the analysis needs to show.

Presenting. Internally first, walking us through what is in the data, what surprised you, and what is still open. The bar is telling us something we had not already seen and supporting it with evidence when we question it. Then to clients and public officials as the material becomes yours end to end. You would present to clients earlier here than at a larger firm, and you would see the whole arc of a project rather than a slice of it.

Improving the method. The standard operating procedure changes with every project, and it only stays current if the person doing the work keeps it current. At the entry end that means recording steps, changes, and open questions faithfully. Beyond that it means filling gaps and resolving ambiguities, and building automation where it earns its place. If you write Python, SQL, or R, we will put it to work replacing a recurring manual process. The goal is to make the work repeatable so effort goes toward what is new.

What this work asks of you

We are not going to pretend there are any tidy lanes in this job. Ultimately, we are quantifying a problem, helping a community see those issues more clearly, and working with our planning team to get communities to rethink how they develop and restack their decks to support an incremental local network of developers who grow and keep their wealth inside their towns and cities. But the way we get there, and what we will need from you to get there, varies; some things we will be asking of you are:

Command of the tools we use, and an appetite for better ones. ArcGIS Pro and Excel are the daily applications we use, and you need real working control of both. Everything past that raises what you are worth to us: scripting, spatial SQL, statistical work, anything that turns a two-day manual process into a repeatable (and one-hour) one. Coding is one way to extend what this practice can do. It is not the only one, but we are interested in how you think you can improve the practice.

Spatial reasoning. The math is great – but we have to be able to apply it to real places, and understand what it means. We need people who can look at a pattern in a valuation map and start asking why that block, why that decade, why that street and not the next one over. And we need someone who can answer those whys. Reading a map as an argument rather than as an output is a lot of the job.

A habit of writing things down. Documentation is part of the work. The method is one of the practice's biggest assets, and it stays functional because the people running it record what they changed and why.

Questions that get asked once. Ask early rather than guess, always. Then apply the answer to the next project without being told it applies.

Plain explanation. You will have to tell a city manager what a model shows without walking her through the model. Written and verbal both, to people who do not share your vocabulary and should not have to.

Judgment about new tools, AI included. The tools we use for this work is changing fast, and we would rather hire someone actively working that out than someone waiting for it to settle. We are interested in people who have found real uses for these tools: drafting, checking their own work, automating tedium, getting unstuck. We are just as interested in whether you know where they fail. A model that invents a plausible number is worse than no model at all, because a plausible wrong number survives review and ends up in front of a council. Tell us what you have tried, what worked, and what you stopped doing after it burned you.

What you’ve got to have

You have to care that American cities are running out of money to maintain what they have built, and you have to want to be part of the answer. You should understand why the arithmetic fails: infrastructure liabilities that outgrow the tax base, development patterns that cost more to serve than they return, and a growth model that has been papering over the gap with new construction since the 1950s. You should be able to hold that understanding without contempt for the places or people living inside them, because the residents dealing with this did not invent the pattern, but they are the ones now paying for it.

For this seat, the math itself has to matter to you intrinsically. A spreadsheet showing that a city loses money on 40 percent of its land is a fact. The map showing which 40 percent, next to which streets, built in which decade, is the thing that changes a council's mind. If doing that work so that you can communicate this to a City Manager, a Public Works Department, a Planning Manager, a City Council, and convince them they need to take a new path this is your job.

We are not looking for people who have already read every book. We are looking for people who have seen the problem, refuse to accept it as permanent, and want to spend their working life building alternatives that hold up financially. Curiosity counts. Certainty does not.

That is the only disqualifier in this posting. Everything else is negotiable.

Baseline qualifications

• A degree or coursework in urban planning, public administration, geography, economics, data analytics, GIS, or a related field. From the planning side, we expect foundational knowledge of how local government operates and how land use works. From the data side, we expect comfort with large tabular datasets. Either one, not both.

• Working proficiency in ArcGIS Pro: data management, geoprocessing, joins, and map production. Advanced ability, at or near the level where you can troubleshoot someone else's broken spatial workflow, moves you toward the senior end of this posting and the pay band with it.

• Strong Excel, including complex formulas, lookups, and data cleaning at scale.

• Numeric judgment beyond spreadsheet mechanics: growth rates, projections, per-unit normalization, and knowing when a sample is too small to say anything.

• Demonstrated ability to follow a multi-step written procedure precisely, and to notice when the procedure is wrong.

• Clear written communication, particularly for documentation and issue logs.

• Enough organization to keep several concurrent tasks moving without being asked twice.

• Coding ability is not required at the entry end. At the senior end we want to see applied work: a script, a tool, an automated workflow you built and someone else used.

• Three or more years of relevant professional experience in fiscal or economic analysis, local government finance, planning analytics, or applied GIS puts you in range for the senior seat. There is no minimum for the entry seat if you can show us the work.

How we work

Verdunity is a small firm, which means your work reaches clients quickly and your judgment matters early. We run on a flexible remote model, with quarterly in-person team meetings held around Texas. As long as you can keep Central Time Zone hours, we can work with you.

You will work with planners, our fiscal analysis practice, and our civil engineering team. We pair planning and fiscal work more tightly than most firms do, so you will learn the money side whether or not you arrive with it.

Compensation and benefits

Starting Salary: $50,000-$80,000 depending on experience and where you land in the capabilities and skillset range this posting covers.

• 10 paid holidays and 3 weeks of paid time off

• Health care stipend

• Life and disability insurance

• Employee assistance program

• Cell phone stipend

• Paid membership to Strong Towns and up to 2 additional professional organizations

• 40 hours of paid personal development time each year, plus expenses

• Length of service award

Why is this such a weird and open-ended posting?

We wrote one posting instead of a few because the distance between an analyst who runs an analysis model well and an analyst who improves the model is a matter of experience, not a really a different job, they exist on a spectrum. Splitting it into two listings would have meant guessing in advance which one you are, and we would rather you tell us.

We also know that a resume blurs the very things we are trying to find. A line that reads "GIS analysis and mapping" tells us nothing about whether you can build a model or compose a map. That is why we ask for work samples.