Emerge Career

CONTEXT Every year, thousands of people leave incarceration ready to work but with no clear path to a career. Emerge Career exists to change that. We train justice-impacted adults for high-paying trades and place them into jobs that change their lives and their families' lives. We've trained hundreds of students. 89% graduate. 92% land jobs. $77K average starting salary. We've outperformed job centers in 9 states. We've placed graduates with 84+ employers and secured over $50M in government contracts. But here's the problem. We're terrible at telling that story. Not because the stories aren't extraordinary. They are. Because no one owns the system that captures them on camera, packages them, and puts them in front of the people who need to see them: legislators deciding whether to fund us, employers deciding whether to hire our graduates, future students deciding whether to sign up. You will fix that. With a camera in your hand, not a brief in your inbox. THE ROLE This is not a marketing manager job. This is not a hands-off creative director job. This is the job for someone who gets on the train, walks into a yard with our students, sets up a shot, runs the interview, drives back, cuts the piece, and ships it the same week. It's also the job for someone who can do that, and then come back to the office and run enrollment interviews with the next 12 students starting Monday. Camera in one hand. Audit-ready paperwork in the other. Both, every week. Interviewer Chronicler You sit across from someone who did 10 years inside and you get them to tell you something they've never told a camera before. You can run a 45-minute interview, walk out with the three soundbites that will carry the piece, and know it before you sit down to edit. Compliance You interview every student before they start hands-on training. This is the first conversation where the learner tells you who they are, what they've been through, and what they want to build. That conversation is also where the story starts, which is why this role owns it. You make sure every enrollment is compliant and audit-ready. Government contracts demand it. You verify IDs, releases, eligibility documents, partner school submissions. You flag compliance gaps before an auditor does. You know whether we can stand behind every number we report to every agency. If you can't, you don't submit it. Not everyone you interview gets in. You hold the hard conversations. You tell people "not yet" when "not yet" is the right answer, and you do it with directness and respect. Some applicants will be angry. Some heartbroken. You handle it. And you treat every rejection and every objection as signal: if the same complaint keeps coming up, that's not a difficult applicant, that's a broken process you escalate to fix. Videographer You shoot. You don't brief a videographer and review their cut. You own the camera, the lens, the audio, the lights, the gimbal. You know what footage you need before you walk in because you've already pre-visualized the edit. You shoot a graduate early in the AM loading their first truck. You shoot the moment a student passes their CDL skills test. You shoot the welding sparks, the HVAC gauge, the diesel mechanic's hands. You get the shot because you're the person holding the camera, not because you sent someone else. Your work doesn't look like a generic company promo. It looks like a documentary. Real light. Real audio. Real people. Editor and Shipper You cut your own work. Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, doesn't matter. You ship a 60-second vertical for social, a 3-minute documentary cut for a funder meeting, and a 15-second hook for paid acquisition off the same shoot. One day in the field. Three weeks of assets. System Builder One field day should produce 10 assets, not one. You build the playbook. Shot lists by program (CDL, HVAC, Diesel). Interview question banks by audience (funder, employer, student). Release form workflow that doesn't take three weeks. Metadata and

Who We Are: Emerge Career’s mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. We’re not just building software; we’re creating pathways to real second chances. Through an all-in-one platform deeply embedded within the criminal justice system, we recruit, train, and place justice-impacted individuals into life-changing careers. Our vision is to become the country’s unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution that meets low-income individuals exactly where they are. Today, the federal government spends billions annually on education and training programs, yet only about 70% of participants graduate, just 38.6% secure training-related employment, and average first-year earnings hover around $34,708. By contrast, our seven-person team has already outperformed the job centers in two entire states (Vermont and South Dakota) in just the past year. With an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, our alumni aren’t just getting jobs—they’re launching new lives with average first-year earnings of $77,352. The results speak for themselves, and we’re just getting started. Before Emerge, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that is dismantling the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, and by major criminal-justice philanthropies such as Arnold Ventures and the Mellon Foundation, Ameelio became a recognized leader in the space. Because of this experience both Zo and Gabe understood what it took to create change from within the system. After serving over 1M people impacted by incarceration, they witnessed firsthand the gap in second-chance opportunities and the chronic unemployment plaguing those impacted by the justice system. Emerge Career is committed to solving this issue.  Our students are at the heart of our work. Their journeys have captured national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe, and our programs now serve entire states and cities. And we’re not doing it alone: our vision has attracted support from Alexis Ohanian (776),  Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. All of us believe that, with the right mix of technology and hands-on practice, we can redefine workforce development and deliver true second chances at scale. Why We Do This: Emerge Career was designed to tackle two systemic issues: recidivism, fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking, workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating. To worsen, the available prison jobs offer meager wages, often less than $1 per hour, and often do not equip individuals with the skills for long-term stable employment.  About the Role: This isn't a traditional sales job; you won't be handed a list of leads. Instead, you'll be one of the first people on the ground, a strategic, independent leader who creates and implements our public-sector sales initiatives from scratch. To date, all of our contracts have been a founder-led effort. Our growth is now at a point where we need to scale this function, and we're looking for a talent who believes we can unify the workforce-development system and deliver second chances at true scale. We hope that can be you. This role blends traditional sales with public policy, program operations, and strategic leadership. Your job is to win transformative public-sector deals that expand Emerge Career’s footprint across the U.S. You'll manage an entire region, identify opportunities, forge relationships, influence decision-makers, and most importantly, c

About the Role We are looking for our first AI-forward growth marketer who wants to outperform entire marketing teams. The engine is already running. You'll inherit real traction and real data, not a blank slate. You'll own the acquisition channels that bring students to Emerge at scale—SEO, paid search, out-of-home, channel partnerships, content, and attribution across all of it—while working closely with teammates who own storytelling, field marketing, and partner relationships. Your job is to figure out where the highest-leverage opportunities are and go after them. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage agencies, fill briefs, or wait for approvals. We believe that one exceptional person, armed with AI-native workflows and genuine creative conviction, can outperform a traditional marketing team. You'll build automated pipelines that generate, test, and optimize creative at a scale no single person could match manually. And you'll do it while deeply understanding the audience—low-income adults, mid-20s to mid-40s, many formerly incarcerated, most mobile-first—because the best growth marketer for Emerge won't just be great at running campaigns, they'll have real empathy for the people on the other end of them. If you're obsessed with performance, energized by ownership, and genuinely excited about building the acquisition engine for a mission that changes lives, you will thrive here. Who You Are You believe everyone deserves a second chance. This isn't a cause you discovered in the job description. You've thought deeply about poverty, incarceration, and opportunity—and you want your work to matter. You understand that behind every campaign metric is a real person trying to change their life. That weight drives you, not burdens you. You have a genuine point of view on marketing. You know what works, what's overrated, and what most teams get wrong. You don't default to best practices when your instincts say otherwise. You have opinions on creative, on channels, on messaging—and you're willing to defend them with data. Safe, hedge-everything marketing bores you. We're not looking for someone who's equally proficient across every marketing discipline. We want someone who is world-class in one or two areas—most likely paid acquisition, SEO, or channel marketing—and capable enough everywhere else. You are AI-native, not AI-curious. You've built real workflows that compress hours into minutes—automated creative testing pipelines, AI-assisted email systems, reporting dashboards that update themselves. You think like an orchestrator: breaking work into discrete tasks, routing each to the right agent, and stitching outputs together into something production-ready. You maintain your own repo of AI skills and workflows—version-controlled, documented, and shared with teammates—and you help others build their own so the whole organization compounds. If you're still at the stage of typing questions into a chat interface or don't know how to set up an MCP connection, this role isn't for you. The gap between a marketer who builds these systems and one who doesn't is now measured in 10x output, not 10% efficiency. You are curious and learn fast. You know that reaching low-income adults in their mid-20s to mid-40s—many formerly incarcerated, most mobile-first—is fundamentally different from marketing a SaaS product. You think about SMS and mobile-native touchpoints, not just landing pages. You think about community trust and word-of-mouth, not just attribution models. You understand that the channels that work for this population—field events, community partners, organic search, referral loops from alumni—may look different from a typical growth playbook, and you're excited by that challenge. You are data-driven and creatively rigorous. You don't guess about what's working—you measure it. You obsess over attribution: you want to know not just how many students enrolled, but which channel, which creative, which touchpoint drove the

About the Role We're looking for a scrappy, hungry operations generalist who's down to hustle, reflect on what's working, and figure out how to scale it. Someone who'll run through walls to support our growth initiatives — jumping into whatever's most broken or most promising in any given week, learning in public, and turning one-off wins into repeatable systems. If you read "operations generalist" and think "too vague," this role isn't for you. If you read it and think "finally, a job where I get to touch everything," keep reading. The one question this role is obsessed with: how do we get more students to enrollment, successfully? The way you'll answer it is by building experiences and spaces — online, in person, in community, inside facilities — that empower students to take the next step, and then reflecting hard on what actually worked. You'll notice the patterns, talk to the students who drifted, rewrite the playbook, and run it again next week a little sharper. The job isn't to stay busy; it's to figure out what actually moves students to enrollment and double down on it. Most companies treat customer service as a cost center — a queue to drain as cheaply as possible. We treat it as our single highest-ROI activity. Every ticket is a labeled training example, every conversation is product research, and every student who feels seen is a student who finishes the program and tells five more people about us. The job isn't to "handle volume." It's to turn support into the engine that compounds enrollments, retention, and word of mouth. That's why community and customer success live in the same role here. The reactive baseline — answering tickets across text and email with real care — is the floor. The proactive layer is where this role gets interesting: hosting community events, running virtual experiences that pull prospective students closer, and treating content creation (short-form video, student stories, behind-the-scenes posts) as a community-building asset that brings people into orbit before they ever submit an application. Reactive support tells us what's broken. Proactive community tells us who we're for. Both feed the same flywheel. At this stage of the company, several things correlate with getting a student to enrollment. We think of them as one job because they share a single goal — a student enrolled — and they all draw on the same two core skills: creating spaces that set students up to succeed, and reflecting rigorously on what's working. Scaling our LLM-powered student support. You'll answer tickets across text and email yourself — enough to deeply understand what students are struggling with — and then turn around and scale that work by training the LLM that handles the rest of our support volume. That means reviewing its outputs, improving its knowledge base, writing the reflections that make it smarter every week, and designing the Claude skills that let one person serve hundreds of students. Every ticket you answer is research; every pattern you spot becomes a system. Grassroots, in-person and virtual community marketing. Emerge has a rare advantage: our work lets us embed directly in the communities our students come from. You'll run the on-the-ground recruitment that turns Emerge into a name brand in those neighborhoods — tabling at community events, building relationships with grassroots organizations and reentry networks, running info sessions, and producing the content (short videos, student spotlights, live virtual sessions) that keeps Emerge top-of-mind between in-person touches. We're excited about someone who'll treat community like a product: test, measure, kill what doesn't work, double down on what does. Supporting and overseeing cohorts of students who are currently incarcerated. One of our goals this quarter is to figure out how to increase the success rate of students who start the program while still inside. We currently run cohorts at Rikers Island and in Massachusetts correctional faci

Operations Manager | Employment Who We Are: Emerge Career’s mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. We’re not just building software; we’re creating pathways to real second chances. Through an all-in-one platform deeply embedded within the criminal justice system, we recruit, train, and place justice-impacted individuals into life-changing careers. Our vision is to become the country’s unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution that meets low-income individuals exactly where they are. Today, the federal government spends billions annually on education and training programs, yet only about 70% of participants graduate, just 38.6% secure training-related employment, and average first-year earnings hover around $34,708. By contrast, our ten-person team has locked in 9 figures in government contracts and outperformed the job centers across 9 states. With an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, our alumni aren't just getting jobs—they're launching new lives with average first-year earnings of $77,352. The results speak for themselves, and we're just getting started. Before Emerge, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that is dismantling the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, and by major criminal-justice philanthropies such as Arnold Ventures and the Mellon Foundation, Ameelio became a recognized leader in the space. Because of this experience both Zo and Gabe understood what it took to create change from within the system. After serving over 1M people impacted by incarceration, they witnessed firsthand the gap in second-chance opportunities and the chronic unemployment plaguing those impacted by the justice system. Emerge Career is committed to solving this issue. Our students are at the heart of our work. Their journeys have captured national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe, and our programs now serve entire states and cities. And we’re not doing it alone: our vision has attracted support from Alexis Ohanian (776),  Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. All of us believe that, with the right mix of technology and hands-on practice, we can redefine workforce development and deliver true second chances at scale. Why We Do This: Emerge Career was designed to tackle two systemic issues: recidivism, fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking, workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating. To worsen, the available prison jobs offer meager wages, often less than $1 per hour, and often do not equip individuals with the skills for long-term stable employment Why this role exists This is how we deliver on our mission. We help people change their lives. You will sit with students at the hardest stage of the journey, the one between a credential and a paycheck, and you will build the systems around it so that stage holds at scale. The premise of the role is contrarian and simple. With the right application of AI and software, one person, you, can orchestrate a system that supports hundreds of job searchers at the same time without giving up the individualization that makes our outcomes real. We don't believe more headcount is the answer. We believe one operator with the right tools and the right judgment beats a team of 10 running playbooks from 2015. You will be the one who proves it. What you'll be doing Coach students directly. This is high-touch work, especially in the first 6 months. You'll work with peo

Who We Are: Emerge Career’s mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. We’re not just building software; we’re creating pathways to real second chances. Through an all-in-one platform deeply embedded within the criminal justice system, we recruit, train, and place justice-impacted individuals into life-changing careers. Our vision is to become the country’s unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution that meets low-income individuals exactly where they are. Today, the federal government spends billions annually on education and training programs, yet only about 70% of participants graduate, just 38.6% secure training-related employment, and average first-year earnings hover around $34,708. By contrast, our seven-person team has already outperformed the job centers in two entire states (Vermont and South Dakota) in just the past year. With an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, our alumni aren’t just getting jobs—they’re launching new lives with average first-year earnings of $77,352. The results speak for themselves, and we’re just getting started. Before Emerge, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that is dismantling the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, and by major criminal-justice philanthropies such as Arnold Ventures and the Mellon Foundation, Ameelio became a recognized leader in the space. Because of this experience both Zo and Gabe understood what it took to create change from within the system. After serving over 1M people impacted by incarceration, they witnessed firsthand the gap in second-chance opportunities and the chronic unemployment plaguing those impacted by the justice system. Emerge Career is committed to solving this issue. Our students are at the heart of our work. Their journeys have captured national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe, and our programs now serve entire states and cities. And we’re not doing it alone: our vision has attracted support from Alexis Ohanian (776),  Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. All of us believe that, with the right mix of technology and hands-on practice, we can redefine workforce development and deliver true second chances at scale. Why We Do This: Emerge Career was designed to tackle two systemic issues: recidivism, fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking, workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating. To worsen, the available prison jobs offer meager wages, often less than $1 per hour, and often do not equip individuals with the skills for long-term stable employment. About the Role We call this a Founding Engineer role—even three years in and with multiple state contracts under our belt—for two reasons. First, you'll be one of our earliest product hires, joining a co-founder who has built the platform solo to date. Second, our growth is outpacing our funnel, and the difference between a student who graduates and a student who drops off often comes down to a single screen, a single email, or a single moment of friction we haven't fixed yet. We're at a critical juncture: we can either hire someone to ship tickets, or we can bring on a growth- and product-obsessed engineer who believes that thoughtful funnels, relentless iteration, and a deep understanding of our students can dramatically change outcomes—and dramatically lower our cost of acquisition. We hope that can be you. This is not a traditional engineering job. You'll own our