Who We Are:

Emerge Career’s mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. We’re not just building software; we’re creating pathways to real second chances. Through an all-in-one platform deeply embedded within the criminal justice system, we recruit, train, and place justice-impacted individuals into life-changing careers.

Our vision is to become the country’s unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution that meets low-income individuals exactly where they are. Today, the federal government spends billions annually on education and training programs, yet only about 70% of participants graduate, just 38.6% secure training-related employment, and average first-year earnings hover around $34,708.

By contrast, our seven-person team has already outperformed the job centers in two entire states (Vermont and South Dakota) in just the past year. With an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, our alumni aren’t just getting jobs—they’re launching new lives with average first-year earnings of $77,352. The results speak for themselves, and we’re just getting started.

Before Emerge, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that is dismantling the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, and by major criminal-justice philanthropies such as Arnold Ventures and the Mellon Foundation, Ameelio became a recognized leader in the space. Because of this experience both Zo and Gabe understood what it took to create change from within the system. After serving over 1M people impacted by incarceration, they witnessed firsthand the gap in second-chance opportunities and the chronic unemployment plaguing those impacted by the justice system. Emerge Career is committed to solving this issue.

Our students are at the heart of our work. Their journeys have captured national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe, and our programs now serve entire states and cities. And we’re not doing it alone: our vision has attracted support from Alexis Ohanian (776),  Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. All of us believe that, with the right mix of technology and hands-on practice, we can redefine workforce development and deliver true second chances at scale.

Why We Do This:

Emerge Career was designed to tackle two systemic issues: recidivism, fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking, workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating. To worsen, the available prison jobs offer meager wages, often less than $1 per hour, and often do not equip individuals with the skills for long-term stable employment.

About the Role

This is RevOps on steroids. You won't just maintain a CRM — you'll build the automated infrastructure that gets us in rooms we shouldn't be in yet and makes our sales team dramatically more effective.

Government deals aren't won through inbound. They're won by building relationships with the right people before anyone else knows there's an opportunity. Your job is to figure out who those people are, find ways to reach them, and build systems that let us do it over and over. Then you'll use those systems yourself — running the plays you build, doing actual outreach, and iterating based on what you learn firsthand.

What You'll Actually Do

You'll spend most of your time on two things:

1. Mapping and Reaching the Right People

Government is a relationship game with formal rules. You need to learn how power flows — who controls budgets, who influences procurement, who's an ally and who's a gatekeeper — and then build systems that help us reach them.

Research the landscape: workforce development boards, city council members, county executives, state legislators, corrections commissioners, probation chiefs. Understand who funds what and who's politically motivated to care about reentry and workforce programs.

Build outreach infrastructure that gets responses from people who ignore 99% of their inbox. This might mean cold email, but it also might mean LinkedIn, warm intros through community partners, showing up at the right public hearing, or getting creative in ways we haven't thought of yet.

Track signals that indicate opportunity — leadership transitions, new federal funding announcements, budget cycles, policy shifts, election results that change priorities. Build workflows so we know about these before our competitors do.

Draft outreach that's genuinely personalized — not "I saw your LinkedIn post" personalized, but "your county just received $2M in DOL reentry funding and here's why that matters" personalized.

2. Building the Machine — and Being Your Own First User

Everything you learn and do should become a repeatable system, not a one-off effort. And the fastest way to make those systems great is to use them yourself.

When we close a contract in NYC, you should be able to quickly identify and score similar opportunities in NJ, CT, PA and spin up outreach targeting the equivalent decision-makers.

Build plays that run automatically where possible — signal detected → research pulled → draft written → pushed to the right person on our team.

Build rep feeds for high-value opportunities that need a human touch — you surface the opportunity, draft the outreach, but the AE or a cofounder takes it the last mile.

You'll be the guinea pig for everything you build. Rather than handing off workflows and waiting for feedback, you'll run outreach yourself, sit in the sales seat, and feel firsthand what works and what doesn't. That tight loop between building and doing is how we iterate fast and ship things that actually move pipeline.

Maintain a living map of our pipeline landscape: who we're targeting, what stage they're in, what's working, what's not.

Who You Are

You're a hacker at heart. You stitch together APIs, scrapers, AI tools, and manual hustle to solve problems that don't have clean solutions. You've probably built automations with Clay, n8n, Make, or custom scripts — not because someone told you to, but because you couldn't help yourself.

You understand power — or want to. You either have experience navigating government, politics, or institutional sales, or you're the type of person who'll read The Power Broker on a weekend and start mapping your city's org chart on Monday. You get that reaching a county executive is a different game than reaching a VP of Sales.

You're not precious about your role. You'll build the system and then pick up the phone. You don't think of sales work as beneath you — you think of it as the fastest way to learn what to build next.

You think in systems. You don't just solve one problem — you build infrastructure that solves a category of problems. You see outreach, research, and relationship-building as one interconnected system.

You're a clear writer. Half of this job is writing — emails to politicians, prompts for AI tools, documentation for the team. You write things people actually read.

You care about the mission. You could automate ad funnels or optimize SaaS conversion rates. But you'd rather use your skills to help people coming out of prison find careers.

Requirements

Available to work in-person in New York City.

Experience building automated workflows (Clay, n8n, Zapier, Make, or custom scripts).

Comfort with APIs, webhooks, and basic scripting (Python, JavaScript, or SQL).

Strong prompting skills — you know how to get useful output from LLMs.

Raw intelligence and curiosity — you learn new tools fast because you have to.

Bonus Points

Experience in government, politics, civic tech, or institutional sales.

Background in outbound sales, SDR work, or growth engineering.

Familiarity with government procurement or public sector relationships.

You've worked at an early-stage startup or built something from scratch.