Growth Intern

The Role:

This won’t be a normal internship. As the Growth Intern at Emerge Career, you’ll be a core part of building our growth engine on the ground. Your job is to find the people whose lives our programs will change — in shelters, barbershops, bodegas, wherever — and get them into our funnel. 

Then: figure out what worked, what didn’t work, and create a repeatable playbook.

The goal: build the grassroots recruitment playbook that Emerge uses to launch in every new market. What you create in NYC becomes the template for launching in Sacramento, Boston, and every market we expand to after that. 🚀

Who We Are:

Emerge Career is building the AI-native workforce development platform of the United States. Our mission: break the cycle of poverty and incarceration by recruiting, training, and placing justice-impacted individuals into careers that’ll change their life. 

Our model uses a hybrid approach — combining technology with a human touch — to replace disconnected, brick-and-mortar job centers. We’re build an integrated, tech-powered solution that meets people exactly where they are.

Today, the federal government spends billions of dollars on vocational training programs, yet only <40% secure relevant employment and their average first-year earnings hover around $35K. 

By contrast, our seven-person team has already outperformed the job centers in two entire states (Vermont and South Dakota). Our programs have a 90%+ job placement rate with an average salary of $80K.

Before Emerge Career, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey. 

Emerge Career is funded by Alexis Ohanian (776 Ventures), Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. 

We’re just getting started.

What You’ll Do:

We’ve closed a 9-figure contract with NYC and it’s time to execute. We need to keep growing one of our core job training programs. You’ll be central to making that happen.

Things will evolve between when you’re reading this and the summer – that’s just the nature of a fast-growing company. But here’s what your summer will likely look like:

• Execute in-person guerrilla marketing experiments across the five boroughs — targeting community based organizations (CBOs), homeless shelters, community events, and human services offices.
• Test different neighborhoods, event formats, outreach tactics, and incentives to find what drives applications and converts to enrollments.
• Track performance rigorously and report weekly on channel metrics, messaging insights, and recommendations for how to keep winning.
• Synthesize learnings into replicable playbooks for the highest-performing strategies.
• Activate and coordinate a network of 100+ brand ambassadors across the city.

What We’re Looking For

One thing: the drive to do whatever it takes, combined with the analytical instinct to learn from it. You might knock on 50 doors in the projects on a Tuesday, track the results in a spreadsheet Tuesday night, adjust your approach Wednesday, and brief the team Wednesday evening on how you plan to scale this across the city by the end of the month. You don’t just hustle — you hustle systematically and have an eye towards scalability.

More specifically, we’re looking for:

• Utilitarian, first-principles thinking — you take big swings, think in terms of 80/20 and can explain why you made X decision over Y decision. 
• Ruthless prioritization and an attention to detail. With minimal resources, it’s critical that you’re always working on the most important thing.
• High agency, hungry, young people — you ask for forgiveness not permission. Moving slowly makes you sick.
• Comfortable in unfamiliar environments (e.g.: onboarding delis/bodega owners in low-income neighborhoods as referral partners). 
• High EQ — you can build trust with anyone, anywhere. 
• You think in terms of hypotheses and experiments (as opposed to immeasurable, whimsical thinking)
• You have an aversion to mediocrity but aren’t afraid to ship/execute
• You likely have a chip on your shoulder and something to prove
• Willing to be in NYC, 5 days a week, for at least 10 weeks this summer

Join If You...

• Want to build a technology company that has the potential to make a huge dent in poverty in America
• Want to be a founder someday
• Love autonomy and get energized by tough problems

We Are Not The Right Place If You...

• Are clout-chasing or resume-padding
• Prefer hands-on “management” or hand-holding
• Are ok with “looks good to me” sentiment

What You’ll Get

• $5,000 / month
• Your own (modest) marketing budget
• Real ownership over a core part of our growth function
• A front-row seat to building a mission-driven startup at scale

How to Apply

Skip the resume and cover letter. Send us three things:

1. Your LinkedIn profile
2. Your answer to this question: If we dropped you in the South Bronx tomorrow and told you to get 50 qualified people to sign up for our job training program in 48 hours, what would you do? Walk us through how you’d spend the time. (Keep it concise, no fluff please.)
3. What do you want out of your career? (A few sentences is fine.)