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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 decision. But you also know that data tells you what happened, not why, and that the best creative insights come from human judgment. You hold both things at once.
6. You are entrepreneurial. You're scrappy, autonomous, and low-maintenance. You don't wait for permission or perfect conditions. You run MVPs, see what works, kill what doesn't, and ship again. You're comfortable being the primary person accountable for acquisition—and you find that energizing, not scary. You roll up your sleeves and solve problems. No job is too small.
7. You play to win. You stay optimistic when things are slow, keep moving when campaigns underperform, and don't catastrophize when a test fails. You're not rattled by ambiguity. You bring a "yes, and" mindset that finds a path forward instead of reasons to slow down.
8. You work hard. You show up early, stay late, and do what needs to get done—no ego, no excuses. This isn't a 9-to-5. The average person at Emerge works 60+ hours/week because we care about the mission. If that sounds miserable, this isn't for you. If it sounds exciting, you'll fit right in.
9. You are a straight shooter. You don't hide bad news or dress up underperforming metrics. You bring clarity, honesty, and accountability to every interaction—internally and externally.
10. You are a clear writer. You don't need to write the next great novel, but you must communicate simply and precisely. Great copy is a superpower in this role. You value brevity and clarity over length and jargon. You understand that in marketing, every word either earns attention or loses it.

Candidate Profiles We're Excited About

• The right hand who's ready to lead. You learned the ropes working for an exceptional growth marketer—maybe at a high-growth startup or a scaled tech company—and now you're ready to go do your boss's job. You were the second-in-command who actually ran the campaigns, built the dashboards, and made the calls. Now you want full ownership.
• The analytical mind turned marketer. Earlier in your career you did something rigorous—banking, consulting, data science—and then pivoted to tech marketing because you wanted to build, not advise. You're more left-brain than right-brain, which makes you lethal on the performance and attribution side. You work incredibly hard and you bring structure to chaos.
• The agency convert. You spent formative years at an agency—maybe as a strategist, media buyer, or account lead—working across multiple clients, industries, and briefs. You moved into tech because you wanted to own outcomes, not just deliverables. You're versatile, fast, and know how to produce high-quality creative under pressure.
• The big tech marketer ready for a real challenge. You started at a company like Google, Meta, or Square, where you learned marketing fundamentals and how to work cross-functionally. But you didn't stay—because you wanted to get your hands dirty at a smaller company where your work has direct, measurable impact. You've been a first or second marketing hire before, and you're ready to do it again for a mission that matters.

Requirements

• Willing to relocate and work in-person in New York City
• Passionate about working with underrepresented communities and tackling challenges related to poverty and inequity
• 5+ years of hands-on growth marketing experience with deep expertise in at least one core channel (paid search, SEO, or channel/field marketing)
• Proven track record of owning campaigns end-to-end—strategy, creative, execution, and analysis—not just managing agencies or writing copy while someone else ran the campaign
• Demonstrated ability to build AI-powered marketing workflows—not just using AI tools, but building automated systems that meaningfully changed how you operate (we'll ask you to walk us through specific examples)
• Experience taking a project from 0 to 1: you've been a founder, first marketing hire, or built something impressive on your own
• Strong analytical ability—you're comfortable building attribution models and turning metrics into decisions

Bonus Points

• Experience building channel partnerships with companies that serve the same demographic—think fintechs like Chime or Cash App, benefits platforms, or other products that low-income adults already use and trust.