Director of Marketing 

Andela is a network of technology leaders dedicated to advancing human potential. We help companies build high-performing distributed engineering teams by investing in Africa’s most talented software developers. Based in NYC, SF, Lagos, Nairobi, and Kampala, Andela is catalyzing the growth of tech ecosystems across the African continent while solving the global technical talent shortage.

The role:

Andela recently hired a VP of Marketing that is rebooting the function at the company. You can almost think of the marketing team as a startup within a startup. Everyone who joins the team today will have to be incredibly hands-on, vision-oriented, and comfortable with the notion that we’re building in flight. It’s a great opportunity for someone who loves to build process vs. follow it, lead and learn simultaneously, and can operate with a high degree of autonomy. This role is ideal for someone who sees their career path as future VP of Marketing or CMO.

The ideal candidate is an experienced marketing leader who is familiar with all aspects of demand generation and can act as a true partner to our growing sales organization. Ideally you’ll have worked within a fast-paced, growth company where you’ve had to wear many hats and do more with less. This role isn’t just about generating top-of-funnel leads, although that’s a core KPI that the team is tasked with. You’ll also be responsible for designing programs that accelerate awareness in the market, improve pipeline velocity, and enhance our overall customer experience throughout the buyer journey.

Scaling and managing teams and working in a highly cross-functional capacity is a core competency of yours. Other things in your background that will help you be successful in this role:

• Experience supporting a two-sided marketplace
• An understanding of the technical hiring landscape
• Experience marketing to developers / technical leaders

These aren’t requirements, but your learning velocity and ability to understand the market dynamics will be critical in your first few weeks. While we do have an on-boarding process, there’s very little in the way of playbooks and process you’ll be inheriting, mostly because your job will be to create it.

In the first 30 days you will:

• Establish trust and credibility with the sales organization; you’ll become best friends with our VP of Sales, Chris (The ideal hire will prevent that terrible scenario where sales says, “Marketing gives us terrible leads” and marketing says, “Sales doesn’t know how to close our leads”; you’ll have built a true partnership between the two organizations)

In the first 90 days you will:

• Create a marketing plan that supports 100% top of funnel-growth quarter over quarter and a point of view with regards to the budget and resources needed to implement it
• Some questions you’ll have to answer or create a POV on:
• How much should we be investing in our field marketing efforts?
• When it comes to effectively reaching developers, what are our best strategies and channels for doing that?
• How can we best leverage our successful customers in our marketing efforts?
• What assets need to be developed in order to best communicate both our brand and product positioning?

Success in the first year:

• There’s a clear story across the organization with regards to how the marketing team impacts the bottom line
• We’ve made progress going from mostly outbound to inbound
• When it comes to time to do Q4 budget planning, there’s a clear sense of where we need to double down on investments and how to hire in order to achieve growth in 2019
• Marketing is seen within the organization as a high performing team with clear KPI’s and articulated career growth & progression for all team members

The challenge:

Despite the rising demand for technical talent, companies are still resorting to traditional tactics like job listings and recruiting agencies to find developers. We have to convince technical hiring managers that a full-time remote developer working in Africa can do the job just as well, if not better.

Andela is not a school. We’re not an outsourcing agency. We’re not a non-profit. We’re selling perspective - a different way to hire and evaluate technical talent - and the belief that when diverse teams come together to build software, the possibilities are endless.

If you’re excited about telling this story and all of the market challenges that come with it, we’d love to speak with you.