About the role

About the role

Having secured ~$50M in government allocations to deliver over the next four years, we know we've built something government wants. Our results nationwide have been strong enough that agencies have awarded us an additional seven figures in contracts to launch new training programs and employment pathways.

We're stretched thin, and we're looking for someone whose sole mission is to build the playbook that helps us scale.

We're looking for someone to join us in New York City and lead new business operations. At first, you'll own:

• Two new training programs we're developing now, from R&D to enrolled students.
• A direct employment pathway that gets people coming out of the system into a job right away.

Who You Are / What You Will Be Doing

• You love the 0 to 1 stage. This role will feel like starting a company inside Emerge. Every new program is its own business, one that takes someone from unemployment to a stable career within months. You'll start each one from a blank page, own its results, and leave behind a playbook that works without you.
• You are spiky in partnerships and business development. You're as comfortable cold calling as you are walking into a conference room or canvassing door to door. Employment is the goal at Emerge, so we design our training programs backward from what employers need. With the right employer partner, our students get hired much faster. You can get in front of hiring managers, earn their trust, and turn one meeting into a steady hiring pipeline.
• You love working with students. You'll work directly with a small group of students in every new program. You'll learn what gets someone from enrollment to a first paycheck, and you'll write it down. That playbook becomes what future operators run and what our engineers build product around.
• You build it yourself. You're not an ideas person who hands the work off. You are comfortable on Claude/Claude Code, loves connectors, launch marketing campaigns, and wire up automations in spreadsheets and no-code tools so you never wait on anyone. AI means you don't need an engineer or a designer to make a move, and you love that.
• You are deeply quantitative. In every meeting, you're the person who picks the numbers apart. You live in spreadsheets and dashboards. You back every claim with research or data from our students. You obsess over the number that matters most: how many students get hired.
• You think from first principles. Nothing about the trades is set in stone. We're rebuilding trade education from the ground up around one outcome: employment. You have a track record of taking messy problems that looked impossible to solve, breaking them apart, and solving them one step at a time.
• You work hard. The average person at Emerge works 60+ hours a 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.

Requirements

• You've been a founder, a consultant, or one of the first 10 people at an early-stage startup.
• You have a track record of serving people directly, through teaching, volunteering, coaching or social work.
• You love Claude and Claude Code, and you can show us something you built with them.
• You're willing to work in person in Harlem, New York City.

What You Will Be Doing

• Launching programs. Take two training programs from R&D to their first students, and build the direct employment pathway from scratch.
• Employer partnerships. Find the employers who will hire our graduates, close them, and keep them hiring.
• Working with students. Support a small group of students yourself so you see where the process breaks before it scales.
• Writing the playbook. Document what works so other operators can run it and engineers can turn it into product.
• Building your own tools. If you need a campaign, an automation, or a dashboard, you build it.
• Tracking. Enrollment, completion, placement and time to hire. You report weekly on what's working and what isn't.

About the interview

• Intro & Work Experience (20 min)
• Take-Home Challenge (3–4 hours)
• Take-Home Review (45 min)
• Cultural Fit (45 min)
• Work Experience (45 min)
• Paid Work Trial (1–2 days). You'll come onsite to work on a real project. You'll be paid $500/day, and all travel expenses are covered.
• Reference Checks. We'll ask to talk with 3–4 people you've worked with. We want honest references, not perfect ones.

About the interview

1. Intro & Work Experience (20 min). We’ll chat briefly about the role and we’ll spend some time reviewing your interests and work experience.
2. Take-Home Challenge. 3-4 hours
3. Take-Home Review (45 min)
4. Cultural Fit (45 min)
5. Work Experience (45 min)
6. Paid Work Trial (1-2 days) — You'll come onsite to work on a real project, with access to internal tools and team collaboration. You'll be paid $500/day. All travel expenses covered.
7. Reference Checks — We'll select 3–4 people you've worked with and request introductions when the time comes. We're looking for honest and raw, not flawless references.

About Emerge Career

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