Avela is a Nobel Prize winning platform for families to navigate their child’s
educational journey. Parents can find, apply, register, and pay for school and
programs for their children, all from a common application system with saved
profiles. Avela also powers backend admissions and operational workflows,
making it easy for schools, districts, and educational providers to equitably
serve students. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for
Schools.”
We're looking for an entrepreneurial business development and marketing leader
who can help build our brand, drive leads, support sales, and grow our
business!
Reporting directly to the CEO, you’ll help crystalize our product-market fit
and design and execute our sales and marketing process. You’ll be responsible
for all stages of the customer acquisition lifecycle (see responsibilities,
below), but your primary focus will be (1) outbound prospecting and lead
generation (2) inbound marketing and content generation, (3) product marketing
and messaging, and (4) field marketing and event sponsorships.
Ideal candidates will have experience with both:
(1) K12 - Experience selling/marketing to school districts or similar public
sector institutions, or at least significant K12 experience
(2) SAAS Startups - Experience at early stage, high growth enterprise SAAS
startups focused on T2D3.
You will be involved in many areas of the business, including product
management, operations, sales, marketing, customer service - you name it,
you’ll help with it. This role is a good fit for a customer centric
entrepreneur and business development guru who loves ambiguity and wants to
solve problems in equity and education.
Note on Titles
At Avela, we eschew corporate hierarchy and the traditional titles that go
with them. We do not have any Chief XYZ Officers, VPs, Directors, Group
Managers, etc. The formal title of the role will be Marketing Lead, but it can
be anywhere from VP to CMO level.
Location
Although we primarily work remotely, we’d like to ensure colleagues have an
opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a full
week to work together onsite at least quarterly. So, we are prioritizing
candidates who live within commuting distance of our four hubs: San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Boston/Cambridge, and New York City. Here's more details:
<https://avela.org/hubs>
Role Description
* Build Avela’s brand, through our website, thought leadership, press/media, and other brand awareness campaigns.
* Generate demand and drive qualified leads to the sales team through a full suite of techniques, including content/inbound marketing (newsletters, webinars, SEO), field marketing (local events, conferences), and outbound marketing (emails, etc).
* Engage in customer conversations to fine tune our product-market fit, refine pricing, and improve product marketing.
* Ideally also lead some sales conversations and close business when another rep is not available.
* Build and manage the go to market team
Example Tasks
* Build Lead Lists - Identify customers matching Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and create lists with contact info for outbound targetings.
* Webinars - Organize webinar series with speakers, ensure 100+ signups at each, and run/execute smooth webinar, share recording with mailing lists.
* Content - Manage our blog, write original thought leadership content, and curate content written by other thought leaders (e.g. Sonali, Parag). Newsletter - Design and publish monthly newsletter for customers and prospects using our content.
* Events -Manage our event calendar, event sponsorships, both setup, and coordinate attendance and post-event follow-ups.
* Partner with customer success, sales, and product to create delightful experiences for customers and prospects.
Qualifications
* **8+ years of full time professional experience**
* **Experience managing a marketing team for at least 2 years, preferably 4+ years**
* **K12 district sales/marketing experience (or similar govtech / public sector)**
* **Startup experience with high growth, enterprise SAAS startups focused on T2D3**
* Excellent communicator, including written and oral
* Capable of producing compelling sales presentations, collateral, and materials
* Passion for education, equity, or social impact
* Entrepreneurial spirit and drive, extraordinary comfort with ambiguity, enjoyment wearing many hats
* Among the best at what you do with a growth mindset and desire to constantly improve
* Living in the US with at least four years of full time professional experience in the USA.
Classification and Compensation
* Reports to CEO
* Exempt Full Time Employee
* Pay range below:
Company
Avela is a Nobel Prize-winning edtech startup building the first platform for
families to navigate their child's educational journey and a universal
application for PK-12 education, daycare, and enrichment programs, promoting
equity and access to education. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or
“Mindbody for Schools.”
For students and families, this simplifies the process of finding and applying
to educational programming. For schools and districts, this streamlines
operations and helps increase enrollment (and hence, revenue).
We sell our application and enrollment platform directly to school districts,
charter networks, other educational providers, cities, and states. We work
with school districts and charter networks across the country, including in
Oakland, Seattle, Hartford, Tulsa, New Orleans, Newark, and Jersey City. We
also work with a range of nonprofits and NGOs, including Teach for America and
the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as the US Military.
Our platform has four parts to cover each stage of the application journey,
from exploring options to applying and final selection and admission:
Avela Explore - Mobile-optimized school finder and opportunity navigator
Avela Apply - Streamlined application management system and tracking
Avela Match - Research-based admission and student assignment lottery system.
Avela Enroll - Online registration, transfers, and enrollment platform with
document collection.
We also offer a range of consulting services to help districts implement
enrollment reforms and advance equity in educational programs.
Learn more at avela.org.
Team
Avela was founded by a renowned team of visionaries, including Nobel Laureate
Joshua Angrist, Clark Medalist Parag Pathak, and social entrepreneur Greg
Bybee. We have a passionate team of entrepreneurs, engineers, economists, and
data scientists - get to know us at <https://avela.org/team>.
Benefits
We love our team and care about their wellness. We strive to offer the best
benefits of our peers, including:
\-- Significant equity
\-- Flexible work policies
\-- Unlimited vacation
\-- Home office stipend or WeWork membership
\-- 401(k) program
\-- Flexible Savings Account (FSA)
\-- Dependent Care Saving Plan (DCFSA)
\-- Commuter Benefits
\-- Life Insurance by Guardian (covered 100%)
\-- Platinum Medical Plan by UnitedHealthcare (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)
\-- Platinum Dental Plan by Guardian Health (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)
\-- Platinum Vision Plan by Guardian Health (Employees 100%, Dependents 40%)
Learn more at avela.org/careers.
Location
We are a flexible, fully remote company, however all full time employees must
live in the United States and meet the work authorization policies below. We
are building geographic "hubs" to facilitate collaboration, so prefer
candidates who are located in/around Boston, New York, Los Angeles, or San
Francisco, or are willing to commute into them for monthly on-sites.
Colleagues are expected to work from a quiet location with reliable, high
speed internet, during continental US hours, and in accordance with our
collaboration norms outlined below. #LI-Remote
Work Authorization
Although we are strongly supportive of immigrants and individuals of all
backgrounds, unfortunately, as a small startup, we are not in a position to
sponsor visas and are only able to consider candidates who are authorized to
work in the United States without employer sponsorship. We apologize for the
inconvenience and look forward to working together in the future.
Remote Working and Collaboration Norms
As a remote-first company, we think deeply about aligning on shared values and
collaboration norms. We trust our team and empower everyone to find the right
balance for their productivity, but also seek to facilitate synchronous
collaboration and minimize asynchronous latency.
We ask everyone to have access to a quiet environment, free from distractions
during working hours with high speed broadband internet. (One of our benefits
is that we'll cover a WeWork membership!) Our default is video-on for meetings
to foster relationships and allow non-verbal communication cues to come
through, however we understand that from time-to-time it’s helpful to turn
video off. We also ask colleagues to have a proper office setup with desk,
external monitor, quality webcam, etc. (Another benefit is that we cover up to
$2,000 of office setup.)
For full time roles, we expect colleagues to work a normal business day in a
continental US timezone of their choice, so long as there's overlap from 12pm
- 6pm ET. This ensures sufficient time for synchronous collaboration, but also
facilitates flexibility in your schedule. (We are open to other working
arrangements, but this must be approved in advance before joining.) We also
expect full time employees to join for biannual week-long team offsites (we
cover the costs, of course).
We Encourage You To Apply
Avela is a safe, inclusive workplace for people of all backgrounds and walks
of life. We strongly encourage you to apply if you are from a marginalized or
underrepresented group, even if you don't meet all of the job requirements. If
you believe this is a role that you’ll be excited to work in every day, want
to be a part of a culture like ours, and will be relentless about pushing
boundaries to succeed, please apply.
Tech Stack (for Product/Engineering Roles):
Experience with our specific technologies is not required, even for
engineering roles, and our stack is constantly evolving. Here's what we're
using now:
Front-end:
\-- React + TypeScript
\-- Chakra UI with focus on a11y
\-- Jest + React Testing Library for unit tests
\-- Playwright for end-to-end tests
Back-end + Database:
\-- GraphQL with Hasura
\-- AWS Lambda with NodeJS / TypeScript and Go.
\-- AWS Serverless Services: Fargate, Aurora, S3, SNS
\-- AWS RDS with PostgreSQL
DevOps:
\-- AWS CDK for Infrastructure as Code
\-- AWS CodeBuild and AWS Codepipeline
\-- AWS Amplify for Front-End
