Director, Program Innovation

Job Title
:
Director, Program Innovation

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

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.

In order to achieve its ambition of serving 80, Fellows over the next decade, Braven is hiring a Director, Program Innovation , 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.

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…