Founding Growth Marketer

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