CMO / VP Marketing

Boston, MA, United States

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.

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 roughly monthly, and that teams have a full week to work together onsite at least quarterly. So, we are only hiring 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 sales/marketing experience strongly preferred (alternatively, B2B, govtech, or education experience required)

Startup experience strongly preferred

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:

$140,000 - $260,000 a year

Base: $140,000 - $200,000 / year

Bonus: $10,000 - $60,000 /

Equity: 50,000 - 200,000 shares

Benefits: $30,000 - $60,000 / year

We give all candidates three package options, with different levels of cash compensation (salary) and stock options (equity). We try to pay competitive salaries and exceptionally strong equity packages, as we want everyone to share in the upside when Avela makes it big! Of course, we are an early stage, education startup, and so cash salaries won't quite be comparable to larger or better funded organizations. But what we lack in cash, we make up for in upside, impact, and fun! We also hope our financial discipline gives you confidence in our long-term potential and incredibly low likelihood of layoffs, like many of our less disciplined counterparts.

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

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