Community & Growth Operator (Contract to Hire)

Short Story; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 66,960; Full time

Job summary

A cutting-edge retailer based in California is seeking a Community & Growth Operator. This early-career role is all about shaping community engagement, driving organic growth, and creating authentic content. Ideal for someone with a passion for customer interaction and content creation, you will transform customers into advocates while managing various growth initiatives. The position starts with a 3-month contract at $6k per month with potential for full-time opportunity, allowing for real ownership and creativity in a dynamic role.

Qualifications

• Native creator with personal audience or managed a community.
• Comfortable on camera and enjoys interacting with people.
• Curious and excited by new challenges.

Responsibilities

• Build and activate community engagement.
• Create and manage organic content.
• Host live programming and community events.

Skills

Community building

Content creation

Customer engagement

Video editing

Social media management

Tools

CapCut

Figma

AI tools

Job description

Overview

Our Story: Short Story is an award-winning, technology-powered retailer dedicated to petite women 5'4" and under. Our mission is to create a seamless shopping experience for millions of petite women so they can dress with effortless confidence.

As a fast-growing startup, we’re revolutionizing retail with a data-driven learning system that leverages customer feedback to create tailored products. We’ve been recognized by top publications like Forbes and Fortune and are backed by top investors who share our vision of building the world\'s next great consumer brand.

Our Values

We’re building a company with intention and purpose. Our culture thrives on data insights, exceptional commitment to fit, and the urgency to move quickly on what matters.

• ✨ Transform Lives. We\'re customer-first. Everything we create exists to give her confidence.
• ⚡️ Demand Excellence. We deliver only our best work, in Fit and Finish. We obsess about details others overlook.
• 💪 Embrace Challenges. We see obstacles as opportunities to invent better solutions.
• 💡 Think Differently. We get a thrill from finding better solutions others haven\'t seen.

The Role

We’re looking for a Community & Growth Operator: an early-career, creator-native generalist to build our organic growth engine. This role focuses on what paid can’t buy: community, culture, word-of-mouth, and retention.

This is not a traditional community manager or social media role. You won’t just post content or moderate comments. Instead, you’ll help turn customers into active members, members into creators, and creators into advocates while flexing across growth and marketing projects as needed. Community is your primary goal, but you are someone who enjoys working across multiple functions. You might be hosting a Live one day, filming lo-fi content the next, helping on a shoot, or supporting a campaign launch. If you like variety, visibility, and learning by doing, then this role is for you.

This role is ideal for someone early in their career who has an innate desire to connect with customers and create an environment of customer love. You’ve probably already built something such as a community, a TikTok, a club, a niche page, a side hustle and want to do it at a brand with real scale.

What You’ll Do

• Build & Activate Community
• Participate directly in our owned communities (like our Facebook Group)
• Spark conversation, engagement, and member-to-member interaction. Identify highly engaged members and help elevate them
• Turn Customers into Creators & Ambassadors
• Activate customers as content creators, advocates, and referrers
• Support a small group of ambassadors and micro-creators
• Provide prompts, frameworks, and light guidance for organic content creation
• Track and surface top-performing community and customer content
• Create Organic, Native Content
• Film and edit short-form, lo-fi, organic video content (non-ad, non-polished). Appear confidently on camera for Lives, BTS, and community moments
• Repurpose live and community moments into reusable content
• Host & Support Live Programming
• Assist with planning and hosting live events (digital and in-person)
• Bring energy, presence, and authenticity to audience interactions
• Experiment, Learn, Repeat
• Participate in test-and-learn growth experiments
• Track basic performance metrics and iterate quickly. Learn what drives participation, sharing, and retention
• Flex Across Marketing
• Jump in as extra hands on shoots, campaigns, launches, or site updates
• Support cross-functional projects as the team evolves

What Success Looks Like

• K-Factor: viral coefficient (how many new users each existing user brings in).
• $0 CAC: Your primary goal is to drive the Customer Acquisition Cost as close to zero as possible through organic channels.
• Active Community Rate: % of users who engage with the brand/community weekly.
• Consistent supply of organic, native content
• A teammate who makes the entire Growth team move faster

What This Role Is Not

• Not a social media scheduler
• Not a passive moderator
• Not a narrowly scoped specialist role

This role is for someone who enjoys ambiguity, experimentation, and ownership.

Who You Are

• You’re a native creator. You grew up making content. You have built a personal audience (5k+ followers on any platform) or have managed a community (50k+ Followers)
• You’re a wizard with CapCut, Figma, and AI tools
• You genuinely enjoy interacting with people and audiences
• You’re comfortable on camera and don’t overthink perfection
• You’re curious, scrappy, and excited by new challenges
• You’ve built or grown something on your own (community, account, project, side hustle)
• You like testing ideas, seeing what works, and iterating fast

You don’t need a perfect resume. We care more about what you’ve built than where you worked.

Why This Role Is Special

This is a Swiss-army-knife growth role designed for someone early in their career who wants real ownership, real exposure, and real learning. You’ll sit at the intersection of community, content, and growth. You’ll be helping shape how Short Story shows up in the world.

Job Set Up

This position is a bit unconventional. We start everyone on a 3-month contract at a flat monthly retainer of $6k a month. This is our mutual vibe check. In these 90 days, you’ll have creative autonomy to find our voice and begin laying the foundation for real community amongst our customers. If you move the needle, we move you to Full-Time immediately with a permanent salary. We’re rooting for you to own this.

Short Story is committed to providing equal employment opportunity and a work environment free of discrimination and harassment for all employees and applicants. We work diligently to ensure equal opportunity for all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.