Job Title : Director, Transformation and Strategy
Team : Office of the Chief Executive Officer
Location : Hybrid in - strong preference for Newark (NJ), or New York City (NYC); Atlanta (GA) or Chicago (IL) also possible
Employment Type : Full-time
FLSA Classification : Exempt
Start Date : ASAP
About Braven
Braven is a national nonprofit that prepares promising college students to secure a strong first opportunity after college graduation through a career-accelerating program.
We work with higher education and employer partners to offer a life-changing experience that begins with a semester-long course for college students, followed by support that lasts through graduation.
Together, our ambition is to help rebuild the middle class and revitalize the American Dream.
To learn more, take a look at Braven’s Jobs Report .
About the Role
In order to achieve its ambition of serving 80,000-100,000 Fellows over the next decade, Braven is hiring a Director, Transformation and Strategy, to join the newly formed Transformation team. Transformation is charged with ensuring we see around corners and are prepared to maximize strategic opportunities in our future. Your role is to turn the ideas that matter most into reality.
You’ll incubate and then hand off initiatives that are critical to our organization's success. Currently, the primary focus is the programmatic design and execution of an expanded partnership pilot with one of our higher education partners, one of the most important strategic bets in Braven’s at our current inflection point in growth. This role has no direct reports, but you'll work across many internal teams. Your success depends on your ability to move people toward shared outcomes without formal authority. You're energized by ambiguity, you think in systems, and you genuinely love figuring out what "cutting edge" means for an organization that is paving the way. You enjoy bringing structure to ambiguous problems without flattening the complexity, and you know when to slow down and define the question before rushing to answer it.
This role will play a pivotal, dynamic role in deepening our career partnerships with universities, helping explore and launch an evolution of our core model. You'll run pilot projects, determine what should be consistent across the organization, and decide what must be unique to meet the needs of the student population and/or local landscape to scale. You bring a broad toolkit: you will design and execute programs, translate research and strategy into what a student’s holistic career experience looks like, analyze data and learnings, and build the programmatic foundation that makes each initiative sustainable and scalable.
The person in this role thrives in a startup environment where job descriptions are starting points, not ceilings, and is willing to roll up their sleeves wherever the mission needs them. This is a small team with a culture where everyone pitches in, shares credit, and stays focused on student impact.
This role is a part of the Office of the Chief Executive Officer and reports directly to the Head of Transformation.
What You’ll Do
Pilot Design & Execution (40%)
• Lead execution and iteration of the highest-potential strategies to emerge from Braven’s org-wide strategic exploration work, likely starting with alumni engagement and talent/employer-pathway pilots, with AI-centered pilots as a likely third
• Test and refine quickly at our first pilot site (and future full-suite partner sites): assess what’s working, and build a clear framework for what can be replicated versus what needs to be redesigned for each new context, culture, and student population
• Partner closely with the Director, Transformation and Operations role on sequencing and dependencies, so pilot work and the broader partnership build stay coordinated rather than competing for the same runway
• Gather updates from across the team and synthesize them into cohesive, well-structured presentations that reflect both progress and honest challenges
• Prepare materials, briefings, and talking points for stakeholder meetings distilling complex pilot activity into clear, compelling narratives for various audiences
• Conduct ongoing landscape research on what peer institutions, employer partners, and edtech players are doing, and translate that into pilot hypotheses worth testing.
Program Strategy & Integration (40%)
• Define strategy for what a fully embedded career experience looks like at scale, inclusive of the magic of Braven’s existing program model, but evolved for our next stage of partnership
• Translate our pilot vision into the program frameworks, decision documents, and design principles that make it a buildable, staffable thing rather than an abstraction
• Conceive, design, and execute specific pilots that get students, alumni, and partner stakeholders genuinely excited about the results
• Lead a team-wide debrief after every pilot: honestly what worked, what flopped, what to try next time — and feed those insights back into the overall design
• Manage pilot logistics end-to-end: design, promotion, materials, execution, and follow-up with little hand-holding and strong attention to detail
• Bring market intelligence into pilot design — track what similar institutions are testing in alumni engagement and early-career talent pathways, and translate that into hypotheses worth piloting
Drive Organizational Learning and Operations (20%)
• Create and own project plans across pilot and program-design initiatives timelines, milestones, cross-functional dependencies, and keep work moving forward with minimal oversight
• Lead and influence teammates in a matrixed environment (i.e., teammates will not directly report into this role, but pilot execution and program design will be deeply collaborative with other teams)
• Design and run a data collection campaign to capture key outcomes
• Build the forms, trackers, and processes that make data collection feel easy for stakeh