ycombinator.comFounding Growth Marketer at Emerge Career | Y Combinator
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. You see these as
co-marketing and distribution channels, not just brand plays.
- Experience marketing to low-income, non-traditional, or underserved audiences
- Experience in ed-tech, workforce development, or social impact organizations
- Experience with out-of-home advertising, field marketing, or community-based outreach
- You've built custom AI tooling for marketing workflows—automated creative pipelines, AI-assisted email systems,
reporting agents, prompt libraries
- Experience in a high-growth startup environment (sub-20 people)
What You Will Be Doing
- Owning student acquisition. You will be accountable for driving qualified student enrollment—not a slice of the
funnel. That means setting the strategy, allocating the budget, building the creative, running the campaigns,
measuring results, and iterating. Nobody is going to hand you a marketing plan. You're going to write it.
- Doubling down on what's already working. 57% of our students come through internet search or social media. You'll
figure out exactly where within that 57% the highest ROI lives—which search queries, which platforms, which creative
formats—and aggressively scale what's working. You'll build the attribution infrastructure to know what's actually
driving enrollment, not just clicks.
- Building AI-powered marketing systems. The highest-leverage thing you can do in this role is automate the
repetitive. You'll identify the workflows that eat time—ad creative production, headline testing, email sequencing,
SEO content generation, performance reporting—and build AI pipelines to handle them. Concretely: you'll use tools
like Claude Code to create specialized agents for each task, build automated creative variation systems, and set up
pipelines where AI flags underperforming campaigns and drafts new assets to test. We expect you to operate with the
output of a team, not just one person. AI is how you get there.
- Running and scaling paid channels. You'll own paid search and explore other paid channels (paid social, out-of-home,
transit, community media) with an obsessive eye on cost-per-enrollment. You'll build the creative, set up the
targeting, run A/B tests on headlines and copy, and optimize relentlessly. You'll know when a campaign is working
and when to kill it.
- Building SEO as a long-term engine. Organic search is likely one of our biggest long-term acquisition channels.
You'll build an SEO strategy grounded in how our prospective students actually search—queries about career changes
after incarceration, trade certifications, workforce programs in their state. You'll create content that ranks,
converts, and compounds over time.
- Exploring channel partnerships. Some of our biggest growth opportunities will come from partnering with companies
that already serve our demographic—fintechs, benefits platforms, community-focused brands. You'll identify and
develop co-marketing and distribution partnerships that put Emerge in front of prospective students through channels
they already use and trust. Think less "brand sponsorship" and more "shared audience, mutual value."
- Supporting grassroots marketing. Out-of-home advertising in the communities we serve. Presence at reentry events,
community college job fairs, workforce development convenings. Some of our most impactful growth will come from
showing up where our students already are—not just online, but in person.
- Building attribution across everything. You'll be responsible for understanding where students come from and why
they enroll. That means building and maintaining attribution systems that connect marketing spend to actual
enrollment outcomes—across paid, organic, referral, field, and partner channels. You'll close the loop between
marketing activity and student outcomes so we can invest with confidence.
Emerge Career is making a dent in poverty. We are powering the skilled trades revolution, serving those who have been
left behind by the system. If you want to put your fingerprints on something that actually changes lives, we'd love to
hear from you.
