Director, Program Innovation

Braven; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 101,000 - 109,000; Full time

Job summary

Braven is seeking a Director of Program Innovation to join the Transformation team. This role focuses on piloting, designing, and scaling high-impact career and education partnerships, driving strategic initiatives from ideation to implementation, and collaborating across university partners and Braven teams.

Reporting to the Head of Transformation, you will manage pilots, translate research into practice, analyze outcomes, and ensure scalable program design at Braven’s growth inflection point.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent required.
• Minimum 5+ years of experience managing multiple complex, cross-functional strategic initiatives.
• Ability to move teams toward shared outcomes without formal authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and execution of high-potential strategies from Braven’s strategic exploration work.
• Test pilot sites and build scalable frameworks for replication across contexts.
• Synthesize updates into cohesive, high-quality presentations.
• Design programs and pilots that engage students, alumni, and partners.
• Own project plans with timelines, milestones, and dependencies.

Education

Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent

Tools

Asana

Trello

Salesforce

Claude

Zoom

Slack

Job description

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

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, 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.

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 stakeholders: low friction, high compliance
• Synthesize findings into clear, compelling narratives for a wide variety of audiences; ensure data and reports are actionable and useful
• Develop high-quality memos, briefings, and presentation materials, ranging from students to board members
• Support the broader team in understanding what the data says about the outcomes and implications for future decisions
• Other duties as assigned

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent
• 5+ years of strong track record of managing multiple complex, cross-functional strategic initiatives and leading others to outcomes including building or launching a new program, function, or business line from the ground up

Preferred Qualifications

• Exceptional ability to collaborate and work in cross-functional teams
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to draft clear, audience-appropriate communications quickly and with minimal direction
• Exceptional ability to synthesize information, identify what should stay consistent, and where adjustments are needed due to various contexts
• Demonstrated ability to move between strategic altitude and hands‑on execution: you have designed a program or pilot from a blank page, and you have also done the operational work yourself
• Track record of influencing and driving alignment across senior stakeholders, including organizational leadership, without formal authority
• Experience with program or instructional design; you know how to translate research and strategy into an experience that actually works for the people going through it, and you iterate quickly based on what pilot data tells you
• Track record of operating in ambiguous environments and creating structure where little exists, requiring constant iteration and resourcefulness
• Experience in the education or nonprofit sector
• Fluency in Asana, Trello, Salesforce, Claude, Zoom, and Slack is ideal; ability to navigate myriad technology tools
• A genuine appreciation for and enjoyment of the dynamic, fast‑paced energy of a college campus, coupled with an ability to connect authentically with diverse stakeholders, ranging from students to university leadership
• Demonstrated commitment to building strong and welcoming cultures that help to develop others
• Exemplification of Braven’s core values
• Experience that has informed your belief in Braven’s mission and has prepared you to work with, or for, Braven’s student Fellow population

Work Demands

• Ability to work in‑person in Atlanta (GA), Chicago (IL), Newark (NJ), or New York City (NYC)
• Travel 20-30% of the time, including periodic travel to partner campuses, especially our pilot site(s)
• Consistent evening and weekend work, especially during peak pilot periods

Additional Requirements

• Authorized to work in the U.S.
• Braven doesn’t offer employment visa sponsorship

Application & Interview Process

• Interview with Hiring Specialist
• Performance Task
• Interview with Hiring Manager
• Panel Interview with Colleagues and Peers

Compensation and Benefits

Braven offers opportunities for salary growth over time. We believe in compensating staff members fairly relative to one another, their qualifications, and their impact on the organization, and we take internal and external equity seriously. Given our commitment to equity, Braven does not negotiate salary offers; instead, each offer is carefully determined using external and internal benchmarks.

The hiring range is determined by role scope, qualifications, and internal equity, with annual growth based on performance. Braven does not base compensation on individual candidate salary expectations and is committed to maintaining internal equity. The hiring ranges for this role by geographic market are set forth at $95,900-$103,000 in Atlanta, $101,200-$108,700 in Chicago, and $111,300-$119,600 in New York/Newark. This is based on a 50-hour work week. This is a full-time, regular, exempt, and benefits-eligible position where you will be working at 100% capacity.

Braven also provides competitive, comprehensive benefits, recognition, and career development. While Braven reserves the right to change benefits at any time, current benefits include:

• Unlimited vacation time in addition to org-wide holidays and week-long shutdowns in July and the end of the calendar year (this is a minimum of 20 days per year)
• Braven supports your path to parenthood and beyond with $25,000 in lifetime Carrot benefits for fertility, family‑building, and hormonal health
• Match of your 401K contribution up to 5% of your base annual salary, starting your first full month
• Coverage of 85% of health insurance premium for employee and dependents
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• A one-month paid sabbatical after 4 years on staff

Location

We gather in the office 3 days a week (Tuesday through Thursday) and work remotely 2 days a week (Monday and Friday). Therefore, this role requires teammates to live within commuting distance of one of our hubs: Atlanta, Chicago, New York City or Newark. We believe in the magic, connection, and collaboration that happens when people work together face-to-face, and we believe in giving people flexibility to focus, balance personal priorities, and save themselves two commutes per week.

Braven is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected factor.