New Business & Strategy Manager

About the role

Our government clients love our product. Our trucking program has proven we can help someone turn their life around in 3 to 6 months. Those results have been strong enough that agencies have awarded us more than 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.

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. 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.