Growth Automation Manager, Student Engagement

This is not a traditional lifecycle marketing role and it is not a campaign-management role. You will own the end-to-end student engagement surface as a product. Students stall in predictable places (e.g. between signup and enrollment, before their first class, when momentum dips mid-program). Right now, the comms that should catch them are scattered across teams and tools, with overlap in some places and gaps in others. Your job is to turn that into one coherent engagement engine: a system that understands where a student is, decides the right next action, and runs it reliably without someone manually pushing every step. You'll do this hands-on, building directly in tools like Customer.io rather than handing specs to someone else. But the tools are the implementation detail. What we actually need is someone who owns the outcome—students moving forward with clarity and confidence—and has the judgment to design the logic, the measurement, and the guardrails behind it. This is a builder-and-owner role with real decision authority over the student comms stack. It reports into Product. If you want a mature lifecycle function with established playbooks, this isn't it. If you want to build that function, it's yours.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end student comms surface: every touchpoint from course enrollment through payment, onboarding, pre-class readiness, activation, and success milestones, owned as one coherent system; Own the decisioning logic behind next-best-action: triggers, segmentation, branching, routing, and escalation that decide what happens for a given student based on behavior and context; Own the measurement system: metrics, experiments, holdouts, and goals that prove a flow moves students forward, and the discipline to kill what doesn't; Own the guardrails: standards that keep automated and AI-assisted communication clear, supportive, and human; Map existing student lifecycle end-to-end and untangle where comms overlap, conflict, or leave gaps; Ship one measurably better flow, e.g. a redesigned activation or pre-class readiness sequence with a real success metric and a holdout to prove the lift

Requirements

Built a lifecycle, growth, or engagement system that ran at scale without manually operating every step and can point to the outcome it drove, not just the workflows shipped; Energized by replacing manual processes with systems, and builds directly in automation, CRM, or workflow tools rather than only writing briefs; Can reason through a full workflow end-to-end: what triggers it, what context it needs, what logic powers it, what channel it uses, when it escalates, and how success is measured; Understands student (or user) motivation well enough to design communication that helps people act without feeling robotic, spammy, or confusing, and cares about owning the outcome, not just the build; Practical and curious about AI as a way to improve workflow design, routing, personalization, QA, and scale (not just to generate content)

Nice to have

Hands-on experience with a lifecycle/automation platform (Customer.io, Braze, Iterable, HubSpot, Klaviyo, or similar); AI agent or support-automation tools (e.g., Decagon); SQL, APIs, webhooks, or low-code tools (Retool, Zapier, Make, n8n); complex-user-journey domain like edtech, healthcare, marketplace, or consumer subscription

Benefits

Meaningful Equity Stake; Subsidized Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance plan options; 401(k); FSA, HSA and commuter benefits; Learning stipend; Open vacation policy with guidance of 15 days PTO annually; Stepful closed the last week of December; 15 work-from-anywhere days; 10 public holidays observed for 2026