Operations and Programs Lead

A Black-led education studio reclaiming how kids learn.

The Emancipation Group is a Black-led innovation studio reshaping education through research, technology, and community. Its premise is sharp: when tools are not designed for Black children, they do not work for Black children — and less than one percent of education R&D is built around their needs. The studio exists to change that.

Its flagship is The Emancipation Game, a math game for students who do not like math. It turns higher-order math into a tool for inquiry and strategy, using global Black history to drive deep thinking. The studio is founder-led, early-stage, and moving fast, with a founder whose time is increasingly spent on the relationships and strategy only she can carry.

The founder can find the status of anything in seconds.

This is the one thing the role turns on. The founder should be able to stop keeping her own list of what she handed you, stop working her own inbox, and stop asking you for status — and trust that all three are held. When she can let go of all three, the role is working.

There is a second truth that defines the role. The operating infrastructure of the studio does not yet fully exist, and building it is the job, not a precondition for it. You build the systems while operating inside them, in real time. This is zero-to-one work for someone energized by exactly that: building the plane and flying it at once.

The operating spine of the studio.

You hold the internal operation end to end. The founder sets direction and stays external; everything that keeps the studio clean, current, and ready is yours.

• Inbox & loop tracker — hold the inbox to a same-day standard for top relationships, draft correspondence in the founder’s voice, and keep a real-time tracker that closes loops rather than just sending replies.
• Calendar & travel — own the calendar and its conventions, protect focused time, and run the founder’s travel logistics through a heavy season.
• People oversight — onboard and hold the cadence for the summer fellows and a research analyst, so their work lands on time without the founder prompting.
• Financial co-management — co-own the budget alongside the founder: track spend, run vendors and invoices, and come to every financial conversation in command of the numbers.
• Records & cadence — keep documents, receipts, and closeouts reconcilable; deliver a daily end-of-day note and run a focused weekly check-in.

Some things sit elsewhere by design: product and build coordination, and final judgment on the most sensitive relationships, which you prepare for the founder rather than decide. Much of what crosses this desk is held in confidence, as a condition of the role.

The traits that matter.

• Responsiveness
  Same-day, every day
  Top relationships hear back the same calendar day; nothing sits past forty-eight hours. The founder never opens the inbox to find a thread she has to pick up herself.
• Judgment
  You manage, you do not relay
  You arrive with the information gathered and the checks done, the open questions framed for a fast decision. You interrogate what you are told before passing it on, so the founder never acts on raw, unverified information.
• Follow-Through
  You drive work to closure
  The fellows and the research analyst finish on time because you tracked it and stayed on it, not because the founder reminded you. You confirm status on your own initiative, every time.
• Precision
  Every detail, exactly right
  Times, locations, links, and attendees are checked against a single source of truth before they reach anyone. On a high-stakes moment, one wrong detail can cost the whole thing, and you know it.
• Command
  You own the financial picture
  You know the cash position, what is spent, committed, and outstanding, at any moment. When a decision is needed, you bring the figures, the context, and a recommendation — not raw data.
• Load-Bearing
  You reduce load, never move it sideways
  Work flows to you and stays there, resolved. Every item you bring the founder is structured so her answer can be a single word. Working with you means she spends less operational time, not more.

An interim role that is its own reward — and a door.

This is an interim engagement that runs through early September, with a checkpoint along the way. It is valued fully on its own terms: bounded, well-defined work, held to an exceptional standard, that takes real weight off the founder and lets the whole studio move faster.

It is also the ground on which a larger question gets answered. At the September checkpoint there is a separate conversation about what comes next — including the real possibility of extending the engagement well beyond the summer, and a potential Chief of Staff role — and how this role is held over the summer will inform it. Nothing is guaranteed, but for the right person this is a genuine chance to build an operating spine from the ground up and grow with a studio that is only just getting started.

What you'll earn.

This is a full-time role at 40 hours per week, worked during EST business hours. Specialist-tier compensation, paid in USD, with a $100 monthly add-on covering tier incentive and standing transfer-fee adjustment, applied on top of base.