Growth & Community Lead

**Growth & Community Lead
** Location: San Francisco, CA
Type: Full-time, in-person/hybrid

About Spine

Spine is building the modern operating layer for employee benefits, compliance, and people operations for startups. We're a YC company selling to venture-backed teams at the exact moment they outgrow their back office.

The Role

You own how Spine shows up in the SF startup ecosystem and everything that turns that presence into pipeline. Events, partnerships, community, and targeted outbound all sit with you. You generate and warm the top and middle of the funnel; our sales team closes. You'll be the reason founders and operators keep seeing, hearing about, and meeting Spine in person.

This is a build-from-zero role. There's no playbook waiting for you. There's a fast-growing company, a strong founder network, and a market that's ready.

What You'll Do

Events & Field

• Plan and run founder dinners, happy hours, panels, and meetups, both Spine-hosted and co-hosted.
• Build a consistent event calendar and own venues, vendors, invites, budgets, registration, and day-of execution.
• Proactively fill rooms with target startups and the specific decision-makers we want (founders, heads of people, finance leads).

Partnerships & Channel

• Build relationships with VC platform and portfolio-ops teams to get Spine in front of their portfolio companies through preferred-vendor status, co-hosted events, and warm intros.
• Own Spine's presence inside the YC ecosystem: YC Deals, batch and alumni penetration, Bookface, group sessions.
• Stand up a referral partner network across fractional CFO firms, fractional HR, startup law firms, and fintech partners, with tracked attribution and a simple partner program.

Community

• Grow and run Spine's community assets, including The People Layer, as a two-way referral engine.
• Plug Spine into operator communities (Operators Guild, F Suite, PeopleTech Partners) and turn them into distribution.

Outbound & Pipeline

• Run targeted outbound (email and calls) to pull priority accounts into events and warm intros.
• Qualify and book meetings, then hand them cleanly to sales. You own everything up to the qualified meeting; sales owns the close.

Ops, CRM & Reporting

• Own CRM hygiene for every event, community, and partner contact.
• Run post-event and post-intro follow-up so nothing goes cold.
• Report weekly on pipeline sourced by channel, and double down on what works.
• Keep light brand presence alive between touchpoints (event recaps, a community newsletter, Spine's founder-facing LinkedIn activity).

What We're Looking For

• 2 to 5 years in field marketing, community, partnerships, growth, or events, ideally including time at an accelerator, VC platform team, or startup ecosystem role.
• A real founder and operator network in SF, or the proven ability to build one fast.
• Evidence you've personally sourced pipeline, not just run events. Come ready with a number.
• Highly organized, owns things end to end, comfortable with no existing playbook.
• Strong writer and relationship-builder who can hold their own in a room full of founders.

First 90 Days

• Get Spine embedded in the current YC batch and listed in YC Deals.
• Land 2 to 3 VC platform or channel partnerships that open warm portfolio pipeline.
• Launch a repeatable event motion and build a healthy CRM of founders, operators, partners, and sourced opportunities.
• Establish weekly channel reporting and identify the 1 to 2 motions worth scaling aggressively.

Compensation & Incentives

• Competitive base salary
• Comprehensive benefits package (including but not limited to: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and flexible paid time off