Associate - Strategic Advisory (Telecom and Digital Infrastructure)

PJT Partners' Strategic Advisory Telecom and Digital Infrastructure team in London is hiring an Associate. The responsibilities: evaluating, structuring and recommending financial and strategic alternatives including mergers, acquisitions and other strategic combinations, asset sales and divestitures; leading the day-to-day execution of transactions including due diligence, valuation analysis and negotiating contracts, working with senior management and coordinating analyst materials; researching targeted industries; valuation analysis of prospective opportunities including the assessment of financial risks; designing quantitative models; preparing written analysis for PJT management and client review; participating in client meetings, negotiations and due diligence sessions; and mentoring and training juniors. The posting adds that the Associate 'will be a critical member of PJT's TMT team with direct involvement in both deal execution and business development, working on lean deal teams with direct exposure to the most senior practitioners'. Source

Infrastructure comes in four flavours and they run on different revenue engines: regulated utilities such as water and energy networks, where allowed revenue is set by Ofwat or Ofgem every five to eight years on the Regulated Asset Base; transport - tolls, airports, rail, ports - which carries demand risk directly, and where 80% of greenfield toll roads overestimate year one traffic by 20-30%; social infrastructure such as PFI schools and hospitals, paid a fixed unitary charge regardless of usage so demand risk is zero; and digital infrastructure, meaning towers, fibre and data centres. Gearing runs high across the asset class, typically 60-80% net debt to RAB, because the cashflows are predictable and asset lives match long debt tenors, with covenants around interest cover above 1.75x and debt service cover of 1.3-1.6x. Airports trade at 14-20x EV/EBITDA and towers at 20-30x. The diligence pain is regulatory resets, contractor insolvency on fixed-price construction, political intervention including windfall taxes, and inflation-linkage mismatches when RPI swaps to CPI. Read the concession; model the downside. Source

The posting calls you a member of the TMT team, but the coverage token is 'Telecom and Digital Infrastructure', and those are not the same preparation. Towers, fibre and data centres are valued as infrastructure - long-lived contracted assets carrying heavy leverage, judged on tenancy, contract length, counterparty and cash yield - not as software, where the argument is about growth and retention metrics. If you are getting ready for this desk, get ready to talk about contracts, counterparties, gearing and cover ratios on a tower or fibre portfolio, not about the SaaS metric stack. 'Strategic Advisory' is PJT's M&A advisory line and 'Associate' is the execution band that also runs the juniors.

The unit is the Telecom and Digital Infrastructure desk inside PJT's global Strategic Advisory group, which the posting describes as one of the most experienced teams in the industry, covering financial institutions, technology, media and telecommunications, natural resources, power and utilities, industrials, healthcare and real estate. The page is explicit about how the desk works: lean deal teams, direct exposure to the most senior practitioners, and - in its own words - 'given the lean nature of our teams all our bankers are flexible and should be prepared to work in sectors/countries outside their main area of focus'. Source

26 people have held London roles in PJT's Strategic Advisory group since 2018, which is the whole group across every sector it covers. The telecom and digital infrastructure desk is one slice of that, so read the word 'lean' on the posting as literal.

That flexibility sentence is a genuine piece of information and it cuts both ways. It means your sector label is a starting point rather than a boundary, so a lean-team seat gives you a broader deal sheet than a bulge-bracket coverage group would in the same two years. It also means you cannot count on staying in digital infrastructure, so if the sector is the reason you want the job, ask what share of the desk's last year was actually towers, fibre and data centres.

PJT Partners is a global advisory-focused investment bank: strategic advisory, shareholder advisory, restructuring and special situations, and private fund advisory and placement for corporations, financial sponsors, institutional investors and governments, with private fund advisory and fundraising for private equity, real estate and hedge fund managers run through PJT Park Hill. Source

150 people have held London roles at PJT Partners as a whole since 2018, split across Restructuring at 44, Strategic Advisory at 26, M&A at 6 and Park Hill at 5.

One Associate seat on one named sector desk, posted 6 August 2026, with a three-year experience floor and no start date: this is a lateral hire into a working team, not an intake. The tag on our row says experienced hire and for once the tag and the text agree. A student cannot convert this into an internship by asking.

No deadline is stated, and a named seat closes when someone signs rather than on a date. One month open on a specialist coverage seat is early rather than late, so if you match the profile the useful thing is to send it this week.

Stated qualifications: a bachelor's degree; a minimum of three years of directly comparable investment banking experience with particular focus on M&A; full breadth of financing experience - equity, equity-linked and debt - alongside strategic advisory experience; knowledge of and experience in the TMT industry, specifically telecommunications, technology and digital infrastructure, and related transactions preferred; experience with financial modelling including developing detailed operating and valuation models for complex transactions; the professional maturity and experience to interact directly with clients and drive origination and execution; the ability to manage several projects at once; fluency in English required and another European language preferred; and the resume must be in PDF format. Source

Read where the hard line falls. Three years of M&A banking is required; sector knowledge is only preferred. That is a meaningful gap: an associate from a generalist or industrials background who can show they have done infrastructure-style leverage and contract work is inside the stated bar, even without a TMT deal sheet. The two things not written down anywhere on the page are a start date and anything about right to work, so both are first-conversation questions rather than assumptions.