Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Entrepreneur-in-Residence DonorsChoose is at a pivotal moment. As one of the nation’s leading education nonprofits, we’ve supported millions of teachers and students by channeling over $1.8B in resources to classrooms across the U.S. Today, we’re pushing ourselves to evolve, from a project-based crowdfunding platform into a system-level engine for educational equity, unlocking new funding models, launching new products, and modernizing how we operate. About the Role DonorsChoose is launching Engine 2: a focused, independently-led effort to develop and scale a new product or business model that can dramatically expand our impact beyond the constraints of our current classroom-project giving model. Hiring for this role is a deliberate investment in tomorrow’s DonorsChoose. This role will build and lead a new team. As the Entrepreneur-in-Residence you will operate as an internal founder by setting direction, building and managing a small team, making hard tradeoffs, and ultimately building a new giving experience that can successfully attract a new donor segment, at scale. In this role you’ll own the end-to-end discovery, validation, and early scaling of this new product that leans on the strengths of DonorsChoose but creates a net new giving experience. Reporting to the CEO, this role will work closely with senior leaders across the organization while maintaining the speed, focus, and autonomy required for successful innovation. This role is intentionally high-ownership and high-stakes with a defined mandate, timeline, and success criteria. While DonorsChoose will invest meaningfully in this work, continued placement at the organization beyond ~2 years is not guaranteed if Engine 2 does not demonstrate viability. Our aim is to provide the authority, resources, and clarity needed to build something real and to determine decisively what should scale. In this role, you will: Within 2-years, validate a new giving experience that will meaningfully grow dollars supporting K-12 classrooms through DonorsChoose. Whether you achieve this goal is the ultimate measure of success in this role. In more detail, you will: • Validate and invalidate ideas rapidly • Design and run MVPs, pilots, and experiments to validate user demand, value proposition, and unit economics. • Engage deeply with teachers, funders, and vendors to ground decisions in real user needs. • Rapidly answer key questions in the market through work that’s directly in touch with the target users and/or funders; answering a key question every 1-2 weeks is the expected pace of work. • Meet with the CEO and a selected governing body to report on learnings every month; report to the board on progress 3-times a year. • Prioritize speed and learning over polish, making evidence-based decisions to iterate, pivot, or stop. • Root approaches in lean start-up models. • Define and refine high-potential product or business concepts capable of reaching $5–10M in annual revenue within 2-years, with a credible path to much larger scale over time. • Understand and effectively serve the needs of a new funder segment • Root this product in the DonorsChoose mission, ensuring it will deepen teacher engagement and equip K–12 public school classrooms. • Leverage DonorsChoose’s existing owned advantages (school access, procurement capabilities, trusted platform), driving efficiency and competitive advantage without sacrificing speed or customer needs. • Evaluate ideas against clear innovation constraints, including scalability, operational simplicity, and revenue potential, building a clear, data-backed investment case for viable ideas, including a believable financial model • Define and track early success metrics, including adoption, retention, operational feasibility, and early revenue signals • Build and lead a small, high-impact team • Hire and lead a lean Engine 2 team (2–4 people) with strong, complementary skillset. • Build and maintain a healthy team culture; establish norms for decision-making, accountability, experimentation, and collaboration that differ from the core org; ensuring a lack of friction without heavy time spent driving buy-in versus doing the work. • Coach team members operating in high ambiguity and ensure momentum through clear milestones. • Define and advocate for a budget and financial investments over time. • Manage relationships with Engine 1 leaders to stay aligned without slowing progress. • Navigate tradeoffs transparently, surfacing tensions early and clearly. This role may be perfect for you if: • You have a founder and builder mindset. You have deep experience launching new products, programs, or business models, whether at a startup or on an innovation team, and are energized by ambiguity, ownership, and learning fast. • You are comfortable with real accountability. You’re excited by clear goals, defined timelines, and meaningful risk. You understand that not all bets succeed and you value clarity and decisiveness over comfort. • You combine strategy with execution. You can zoom out to set direction and zoom in to write emails, run interviews, analyze data, or prototype ideas. You’re not precious about role boundaries or afraid to get your hands dirty. • You are deeply mission-aligned. You care about public education, equity, and delivering real value to teachers and students. You’re motivated by impact as the ultimate goal. • You are externally oriented and evidence-driven. You seek truth from users, markets, and data. You test assumptions early and change course when evidence demands it. • You are excited to travel and get out of the building. You recognize that to learn quickly, you must interface regularly with real stakeholders and are willing to do what it takes to get in front of them. • You are a strong leader. You know what should come next and how to manage and get the best work out of a team of experienced folks. Compensation & Benefits Our compensation philosophy ensures that we are both externally competitive with tech-forward nonprofits of a similar size and internally fair in our pay practices. The following ranges represent the target offer range given the scope and experience expectations for this role. • The hiring salary range for this role is $207,000 - $229,500. • We have a hiring salary range of $230,000 - $255,000 for specific higher cost of labor locations, which include New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Once employees are hired, everyone at DonorsChoose is eligible to receive annual performance-based raises as they grow in their role. We are open to a variety of experiences, and recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced or more senior than this job description as posted. If you don’t check every box listed here, or you know you’d bring additional experience to the table, we hope you’ll submit your application. In addition, we offer full-time staff 25 paid vacation days per year and 11 paid holidays, a rich employer-paid individual and family health plan, a matching 401(k) plan (up to 5% of base salary), annual professional development stipend, and casual and flexible work environment. To learn more about what it is like to work for DonorsChoose, visit our careers page. Hybrid Workplace and Other Details In this role, you’ll have the option to work a flexible hybrid schedule in our NYC office, or to work fully remotely from CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IL, IN, MA, MD, MI, MN, NC, NJ, NY, OR, PA, TN, TX, VA, WA, or WI. New York City, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco based preferred. Candidates who are not in the NYC area should expect to travel to our NYC office on an as-needed basis, about 4-6 times per year. All work-related travel expenses will be covered by the organization. DonorsChoose participates in E-Verify. We will provide the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee’s Form I-9 to confirm work authorization. An important note on communications: All messages from our hiring team will come from an official @donorschoose.org email address. If you ever receive a message about a role with us from a different domain, it’s not from us, and you should not reply or click on any links. We care deeply about your time, your privacy, and your experience—thank you for your interest in joining the DonorsChoose mission! DonorsChoose Core Values EQUITY Combating systemic inequity is crucial to a brighter future for all. This reality fuels our ambitions and drives us to persevere. INGENUITY Complex problems require innovative solutions. We dream big, get creative, roll up our sleeves, and take action. We believe the best products can change the world. HUMANITY People are the heart of our team and the communities we serve. Our compassion informs our goals and how we work together to achieve them. INTEGRITY We strive to do right. We’re up-front about the facts. We boldly learn and grow from mistakes. LEARNING Education is the beating heart of our organization, inside and out. We’re curious. We listen. We know we don’t know everything. GRATITUDE We begin and end with thanks. We take joy in our mission, our communities, and each other. To Apply Please submit your resume and answer the application questions online. Since we’re trying to get to know you through our hiring process, we ask that you please refrain from using AI writing tools to craft your response to our application questions. A cover letter is optional and may be addressed to DonorsChoose Hiring Team. A Final Note The DonorsChoose team works toward a nation where students in every community have the resources needed for an excellent education. To do this we hire and support a diverse team of the best and the brightest talent available because it makes us more effective, high-performing, creative and resilient. If you are passionate about our mission, highly skilled in your field, and looking for a place where you can bring all of yourself to work, we want you.