Head of Marketing

Kodable Education; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Vision Insurance

Dental Insurance

Life Insurance

Job summary

Kodable Education is seeking a marketing leader to own strategy and drive growth in K-12 edtech. You will lead a small team, set the direction, and personally execute core initiatives across channels.

You will partner with product to build growth loops, run lifecycle programs, and craft messaging for teachers and parents. This lean company rewards hands-on leaders who can ship, measure, and iterate with limited cadence.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in marketing, with at least 2 in a senior or lead role at a company under 50 people.
• First or second marketing hire at a small company and built things from scratch.
• Experience with product-led growth: referrals, activation flows, lifecycle emails, in-app campaigns.
• Experience marketing to institutional B2B audiences (schools/government/nonprofits).
• Strong writing ability; writing sample required; avoid AI-generated submissions.
• Data literate: can pull metrics, build a basic funnel view, and make decisions.
• Can operate marketing tools end-to-end: emails, instrumentation, data views, iteration.
• Thinks of marketing as a system, not a collection of channels.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and self-directed work.
• Edtech experience, ideally K-12 or teacher/parent dual audience.
• Grew a school-to-home or B2B2C channel with distinct end users and budgets.
• Shipped a referral or word-of-mouth program with measurable lift.

Responsibilities

• Own marketing strategy end-to-end: channels, campaigns, positioning, and paid vs. organic mix.
• Execute most work personally: emails, in-app campaigns, landing pages, launch plans; measure results.
• Write, build, ship, and measure; develop team members while owning cross-functional work.
• Collaborate with product to identify growth loops and activate them at scale.

Job description

Kodable prepares kids for the future by teaching essential digital literacy skills — coding, typing, STEM, and more. We're in over half the elementary schools in the US, we're profitable, and we need someone to own marketing who actually knows what they're doing.

You'd lead a small team, set the strategy, and do a lot of the work yourself. There is no agency on retainer. There's no big department waiting for a leader. There's an opportunity to build something from a position of real strength.

If that sounds limiting, this isn't your role. If it sounds like freedom, keep reading.

What Kodable actually is

We're a K-5 digital literacy platform — started as a coding app, now expanding into typing and eventually digital citizenship. We've been around for 15 years, we're bootstrapped-in-spirit (lean, profitable, founder-led), and we've built something that teachers genuinely love. Our growth has been almost entirely product-led. Teachers find us, use the free version, and schools convert to paid when they see it working.

That's not a limitation — it's a clue. The best marketing channels for Kodable look like product features, not ad campaigns. A share-your-progress button has outperformed every paid campaign we've ever run. The person who thrives here will find that fascinating, not frustrating.

What this role actually looks like

You'd own marketing strategy end to end. What channels we invest in, what campaigns we run, how we position each product, how we convert free schools to paid, how we think about the parent audience, how we launch new products. You'd look at the whole picture and decide where to focus.

You'd execute most of it yourself. Email sequences, in-app campaigns, referral mechanics, landing pages, product positioning, launch plans. You'd write, build, ship, and measure. You'd manage and develop the people on your team, but the strategic and cross-functional marketing work is yours to do.

You'd think like a product person. Our best growth levers are baked into the product itself — school-to-home sharing, in-app events, activation flows, the moment a teacher sees a student's face light up and tells another teacher. You'd work closely with our product team to identify and build these loops, not just promote them after the fact.

What has not worked (so we can save each other time)

• Paid acquisition. We've tried it. The economics don't work for our model. If your playbook starts with "let's test some Facebook ads," this isn't the role.
• Generic B2B SaaS marketing motions. We sell to schools. Teachers are not SDRs' inbound leads. The buying cycle is seasonal, budget-dependent, and relationship-driven.
• Marketing people who are "big picture" but can't execute. We're a lean company. Everyone does real work here.

You're a good fit if

• You have 5+ years in marketing, with at least 2 in a senior or lead role at a company under 50 people
• You've been the first or second marketing hire at a small company — and built things from scratch rather than inheriting a system
• You've worked in product-led growth: referral mechanics, activation flows, lifecycle email, in-app campaigns. Not managed vendors who did it but actually built it yourself
• You've marketed to an institutional B2B audience (schools, government, nonprofits, healthcare) and understand that procurement isn't an impulse purchase
• You can write. Not "I can manage a copywriter" — you can write compelling copy yourself. Writing sample required; AI-generated submissions are an automatic disqualifier
• You're data literate: you can pull metrics, build a basic funnel view, and make decisions without a dedicated analyst
• You can operate marketing tools end-to-end — build an email, add instrumentation, view data, and iterate
• You think about marketing as a system, not a collection of channels
• You're comfortable with ambiguity and can self-direct without much structure
• You have taste. You know the difference between marketing that respects its audience and marketing that talks at them
• You have edtech experience, ideally K-12 or a platform with a teacher/parent dual audience
• You've grown a school-to-home or B2B2C channel where the end user and the budget holder are different people
• You've shipped a referral or word-of-mouth program with measurable lift

Logistics

• Reports directly to the founder/CEO
• $150,000–$200,000 annual salary
• 100% covered Health, Vision, Dental, and Life Insurance