Growth Automation Manager, Student Engagement

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Map the existing student lifecycle end-to-end and untangle where comms currently overlap, conflict, or leave gaps. You turn the current fragmented picture into a single source of truth.
• Cut the redundant and competing sends that create noise across the student journey, and establish a clear logic for what fires when.
• Ship one measurably better flow. For example, a redesigned activation or pre-class readiness sequence with a real success metric and a holdout to prove the lift.
• Over time, you'll move Stepful from fragmented, team-by-team outreach to a coordinated engagement engine that scales with the business and helps every student take the next step with clarity and confidence.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• Experience building a lifecycle, growth, or engagement system that ran at scale without you manually operating every step.
• Practical and curious about AI as a way to improve workflow design, routing, personalization, QA, and scale (not just to generate content).

Skills

• Ability to 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.
• Understanding of student (or user) motivation well enough to design communication that helps people act without feeling robotic, spammy, or confusing.

Benefits

• Base compensation range: $111,000 - $160,000
• Meaningful Equity Stake
• Subsidized Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance plan options
• 401(k)
• FSA, HSA and commuter benefits
• Learning stipend
• Open vacation policy, including: Interview Process