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Program Manager

San Francisco, CA
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.”

Role

Avela is seeking a Program Manager to join our fast-growing team and help schools and districts implement and optimize our platform. You’ll manage projects, support customers, and ensure every partner is set up for success — from launch through renewal.

Location

We’re a semi-remote company with hubs in San Francisco and Boston. The San Francisco hub includes our Client Services Lead, so we strongly prefer candidates living in the SF Bay Area to facilitate in-person collaboration and social connection.

Responsibilities

  • 50% Customer Support - You’ll directly support current customers post-launch with their use of Avela, through training, troubleshooting issues, software configuration, data manipulation and analysis, and identifying opportunities for improving their processes.
  • 30% Project Management - You’ll support implementation projects with new customers, developing and managing the project plan and deliverables. Eventually you will also lead new implementations of Avela.
  • 10% Business Development - You’ll support efforts to bring in new clients and/or expand our relationship with existing clients.
  • 10% Operational - As a growing startup, we all pitch in to do whatever it takes to build our organization!

Qualifications

  • Strength and experience in each of the above job responsibilities.
  • 4+ years of professional experience, at least 2 of which are in K-12 education operations or administration.
  • Customer-centric mindset: creative problem-solving skills; proven record of negotiating competing (and conflicting) stakeholder perspectives; ability to balance customer requests with product priorities and business needs.
  • Quantitative skills, including experience gathering and cleaning data, analyzing large datasets, and presenting results/insights to a non-technically savvy audience.
  • Comfort with engaging in sales and marketing: product demos, boothing at events, discussing contract renewal, and so forth.
  • Excellent communicator, including written and oral.
  • 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.
  • Passion for education, equity, and social impact.
  • Legal ability to work in the US and willingness to work continental US hours.
  • Preference for candidates with one or more of the following skillsets:
    • Familiarity with charter sector
    • Experience in client management role (e.g., consulting)
    • Experience with a statistical software package (e.g., Stata, SAS, SPSS, R)

Compensation 

The expected salary range for this role is $75,000–$90,000 per year. The starting wage will depend on a number of factors including the candidate’s location, skills, experience, market demands, and internal pay parity.
 
We also offer generous equity and a competitive benefits package.
 

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 
-- Generous medical, dental, and vision insurance, with 100% premium coverage for employees and strong dependent options
-- Wellness benefits including Talkspace therapy membership, One Medical membership, and Kindbody fertility and family-building support
 
Learn more at avela.org/careers.

Location

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates for most roles who live within one of our two hubs:

  • San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
  • Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Please review the specific job description carefully, as each role might have it’s own unique geographic requirements. For example, some roles might only hire in one hub where the hiring manager is located, and other roles might benefit from geographic distribution and support hiring outside of hubs (e.g. sales).

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet.  We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization.

Just like we believe in the value of finding the right school for each child, we want to help candidates find the right company. To help you evaluate if Avela is the right fit, we want to be transparent about our evolving company culture and approach to onsite collaboration. You can read more this Community Hub Model and our collaboration norms here. Over time, we expect to spend more time working collaboratively in our hubs.

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.

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.

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