About the role

As Senior Partnerships Manager, your mission is to open doors for our graduates who are looking for a real second-chance opportunity.

What you'll be doing

Land hiring partners. This is business development in the real economy. You'll prospect, pitch, and close employers who commit to interviewing and hiring our graduates. You own the top of the employer funnel, and you own the close. You make the business case and handle the hard objections without flinching.

Obsess over getting students hired. Handshake agreements aren't enough. You follow every commitment until it becomes an interview, an offer, and a first day on the job. Your job isn't done until you can show the impact on the business.

Own the employer relationship end to end. Define the stages, from first touch to signed commitment to repeat hiring. Instrument each one. Set the leading and lagging indicators and report on them weekly. When a partner goes quiet, you know before anyone else and you re-engage them.

Negotiate commitments that hold. Interview slots, hiring targets, onboarding support. You get the commitment, and you make sure the employer follows through.

Document everything. Your work feeds directly into our operations. You own the partnership data and keep it clean.

Who you are

You're entrepreneurial. Scrappy, resourceful, autonomous, low-maintenance. You move fast. You change the pitch, the target list, or the process the moment the data tells you to. No account is too small and no cold call is beneath you.

You own strategy and execution. You can write the one-pager that defines which industries and employers we target. You can also run the CRM that keeps open relationships from falling through the cracks.

You're analytical. You think in leading and lagging indicators. You pull your own data, clean it yourself, and build your own models. Dirty data makes you paranoid, so you fix it before anyone makes a decision based on it.

You look for deals where both sides win. You're pragmatic. You'll adjust how we position Emerge to fit what each employer cares about.

You create order out of chaos. You've worked at an operationally intense, high-growth startup. When the business learns something new, you throw out last month's playbook and build the right one.

You work hard. You show up early, stay late, and do what needs to get done. The team puts in 60+ hours a week because we care about the mission and each other. If that sounds miserable, this isn't for you.

You're a straight shooter. Hard conversations don't scare you, whether they're with a skeptical employer or your own team. You bring clarity, care, and accountability.

You're obsessed with operational detail. You feel the weight of this role. You know one missed follow-up with an employer can mean ten students who don't get interviewed. You own the handoff from signed commitment to the first student application. Excellence means you run that handoff end to end yourself, then build the systems that let the whole team run a partnership from first touch to placement without waiting on anyone.

You write clearly. Short sentences. Specific claims. Active voice. Good writing wins deals and keeps a 10-person team aligned in a high-stakes environment.

Candidate profiles we're excited about

The early-stage operator who grew into partnerships. You joined a startup early and cut your teeth managing deals with Fortune 500 companies. Over time you became more public-facing and started closing deals of your own. You know how to navigate a big, slow organization and how to sit across from a decision-maker and get to yes.

The early partnerships hire at a seed or Series A startup in an operationally intense category. Healthcare, logistics, edtech, marketplaces: places where supply and demand both break in the real world if you miss a step. You were employee #2 to #15. You wrote the first partnerships playbook. You know what it's like to own an entire business metric and build the relationships that move it.

About the interview

About the Interview Process

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. Technical Interview (24 hours). We’ll send you a prompt 48 hours before the interview and you will pitch us live on your proposal.
3. Cultural Fit Interview (60 min)
4. 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.
5. 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