Operations Manager, Community & Customer Success

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