About Pursuit
Our mission is to create economic transformation. By training low-income adults to launch and advance careers as software engineers, we help our Fellows go from earning $18,000 to over $90,000 starting salary on average, adding an estimated $2M in lifetime earnings. Pursuit partners with leading companies like Blackstone, USV, Citi, Peloton, and Uber to employ Fellows in career-defining engineering roles and supports them with on-the-job training to ensure potential translates to performance. Since 2013, Pursuit has created ~$1B in total lifetime wage gains, creating lasting economic mobility that spans generations.
Pursuit’s proven solution is built on two interconnected components: training (which includes community development, Core pre-job training, and Commit on-the-job training) and a financial product (known as Bond). However, growing training alone will not meet the magnitude of need nor solve new societal challenges ahead. The typical expectation is to expand our training to other cities, but this will not come anywhere close to creating good jobs for millions of low-income Americans. Instead, our strategy for scaled impact is to evolve our financial product and create tools for other organizations, jobs, and places. We believe that this will not only create good jobs for millions of low-income Americans but will also generate a new trillion-dollar market directly tied to results in the long term.
About the role
Pursuit has been building an innovative financial product, known as the Pursuit Bond, which aims to directly connect capital markets and training organizations through an outcomes-based model. The Pursuit Bond is poised to play a pivotal role in our growth strategy over the next decade and will be a key driver for scale and a business capable of serving other training and educational institutions.
To enable this, we need to establish the necessary infrastructure, design, customer experience, processes, systems, and policies. These foundational elements are essential to ensure successful Bond payment outcomes and enable the growth of the product from serving 1,000 Fellows currently to 10,000+ over the next five years.
As the Head of Bond Platform Operations, you’ll play a pivotal role in building a category-defining financial product: A great opportunity to build the value proposition for different end users including Pursuit Fellows, investors, employers, and public institutions; and drive outcomes.
As the Head of Bond Platform Operations, you will:
- Build a payments and servicing model to position for broader adoption of the Pursuit Bond as a financing vehicle
- Develop a potentially self-sustaining, replicable model ensuring successful payment rates and superior experience of Pursuit Bond
- Design short- and long-term incentives, identify partnership opportunities and build relevant partnerships within the ecosystem that drive payments
- Set up outcome data infrastructure. As this product evolves, the amount of data collected over time will increase massively and be invaluable as quantifiable evidence of our growing impact.
- Develop innovative approaches to acquire and maintain data outcomes
- Compile insights and analytics on the Pursuit Fellows’ career journey
- Ensure data integrity, creating guidelines and guardrails for data hygiene moving forward
- Own Pursuit Fellows’ Bond journey end-to-end Fellow experience and education defining the milestones and relevant triggers across Pursuit Fellows’ lifecycle
- Build a scalable engagement playbook, laying the foundation for messaging across various scenarios to drive behavior towards intended outcomes
- Iterate and experiment to identify the most effective relationship activities at select touchpoints, creating a resource library for future scale
What you need to be considered for the Head of Bond Platform Operations role:
- Experience in
- Building a multi sided product, ideally in services industries
- Customer-facing touchpoints and techniques in influence and persuasion
- Working with data and ability to recognize patterns
- Leading cross-functionally to achieve targeted outcomes
- Proven record in Operations, preferably at an early stage company, or a new division/product within a larger company
- Scrappy and creative, with the mentality to keep innovating
- Ability to both get down to detail and develop higher level strategic views
- Superior Communication skills: Our multi-sided bond platform will have different types of users with different needs/perspectives. Great communication skills are essential.
Where you’ll work:
- 3-4 days per week in our Long Island City office
Salary & Benefits:
The salary range for this role is $180,000-220,000 base + incentive compensation.
The compensation range above is for the expectations as laid out in the job description, however, we are often open to a wide variety of profiles and recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. If that ends up being the case, the updated salary range will be communicated to you as a candidate.
Pursuit offers:
- Great culture where transparency, respect, teamwork, and kindness are valued
- Competitive compensation in base, plus bonus and a full benefits package
- 401k Match
- Unlimited PTO and an all-Pursuit summer break the last week of August and a week-long holiday the last week of December
- Friday work from home
- Catered lunches once a week and delicious snacks
- An opportunity to work at the intersection of tech and social impact, and make a direct impact on the communities of those we serve.
We are One Big Team
The passionate and collaborative team at Pursuit gives its all to achieve our mission. And it’s not just staff. We work with employer partners that love hiring our Fellows because they are so well prepared, ranging from big financial firms to scrappy startups, and everything in between. We also activate and engage hundreds of volunteers that come from all areas of the tech industry. These experts and professionals help keep our curriculum fresh and our standards for achievement high by participating in our admissions process, as well as program-specific activities such as interview training, DemoDays, Hackathons, and Capstone projects.
Pursuit values diversity:
Our team has a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and we value the richness that diversity brings to our organization. We welcome new perspectives and affirm that all employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, national origin, age, familial or marital status, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other classification protected by federal, state, or local law. Pursuit is an equal opportunity employer.
What We Do
Pursuit is a social impact organization that creates transformation where it’s needed most. Through our intensive software developer training program, we teach high-need, high-potential adults the technical skills and industry smarts needed to get their first tech jobs, advance in their careers, and become the next generation of leaders in tech. In addition to training and career support, Pursuit’s innovative operating model combines partnerships with tech companies to retrain their blue-collar workers and social impact investments to re-envision funding for outcomes-based organizations.
Our graduates are hired by leading companies like Pinterest, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, BlackRock, and JPMorgan Chase, and increase their average annual salaries from $18,000 to over $85,000. By connecting talent with opportunity, Pursuit empowers graduates to transform their families, tech companies, and communities across the nation. Read about our work in the New York Times: Income Before: $18,000. After: $85,000. Does Tiny Nonprofit Hold a Key to the Middle Class?
Why Work With Us
Pursuit is a social enterprise with the energy of a startup. We take new and innovative approaches and channel impact investments to drive greater scale and impact. We are passionate, collaborative, adaptable, and inclusive. Work with us to help underserved communities access life-changing tech opportunities.