Community Manager @ Hack Club

Location: Remote with travel

Hack Club is one of the most active online communities of high school hackers on the web.

We are seeking a full-time hire to own and grow the Hack Club community (11k students on our Slack) to create a wholesome, technical, and inclusive place for every burgeoning teen hacker worldwide.

Your goal: make the Hack Club Slack the best place on the internet for technical teenagers.

Founded in 2014 by a teen programmer, the mission of Hack Club is to prepare young people to make smart, ethical, and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them technical aptitude and the hacker values of collaboration, integrity, helpfulness, curiosity, and an anti-B.S. mindset. We’re built by hackers, for hackers. Currently, there are Hack Clubs in 22 countries around the world. Wall Street Journal wrote about us in 2019. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, with donors including Elon Musk, Tom Preston-Werner, and senior founders and engineers from the tech industry.

Hack Club works toward our mission through creating and fostering a new identity in high schools worldwide. Alongside the soccer players and theater kids, we aspire to create a new type of high schooler: the teenage hacker. Our goal: to become as ubiquitous, as universal, and as culturally foundational for young people today as the Girl and Boy Scouts were 70 years ago.

Students in the Hack Club community sent 62,000 messages last week and there are 850 weekly active members. In total, Hack Clubbers have posted 225k messages in the last 30 days. To see some projects Hack Clubbers built, check out what we did this summer: https://summer.hackclub.com

Couple more things on your role. You’ll:

  • Be the leader at HQ for making the Hack Club Slack a special, magical, wholesome, and growing place on the internet for technical teenagers. You will be the architect for your position and the direction the Hack Club community will be going.
  • Lead Community Team, have daily communication with them, and be a mentor to every Hack Clubber within it. Work with them to plan and execute events.
  • Act as a mentor to our community of 10,000 teenage hackers. Have 1:1 conversations with students, help beginners on their code questions, and help and inspire advanced Hack Clubbers to further improve themselves and the community
  • Hang out on the Hack Club Slack and be a positive, trend-setting influence within it, leading by example
  • Help students form meaningful friendships within the Slack. Read more on how this has happened in the past: https://gist.github.com/zachlatta/6583e7c7f80c32ba8f5b4e824180d00a
  • Be a point of contact for inquisitive parents and people who expect an adult to respond when they email

About you:

  • You’re technical, self-taught, and began learning in high school or earlier
  • You embody the values of a model Hack Clubber: collaborative, kind, high integrity, helpful, and curious
  • You’re excited to work 1:1 with high school students every day
  • You have the traits of a wonderful mentor: never condescending, never telling students how to do things, answer questions, but don’t lock students into any one specific course of action, genuinely want to see students learn and figure out things on their own
  • You played an important role in an online community when you were a teenager. You could have ran a trend-setting Tumblr, grown up on the Minecraft modding forums, created fanfiction on AO3, sold Runescape bots, ran a Club Penguin blog, been an artist on DeviantArt, been a moderator in an online MMO, created a YouTube channel when you were 12, helped grow an IRC network, or anything else along the same vein. These are all things we’re looking for, but even if you don’t think you hit these, you should apply anyway! We’re looking for a broad range of things.

Remote is OK, but you must be willing to travel on a regular basis. If remote, must have excellent communication skills with prior remote experience. If you haven’t worked remotely before, that is OK – we have an in-person office in Burlington, Vermont with 4 staff that you can join us at after quarantining for 14 days and passing a negative COVID test.

To apply, email us at slackalacker@hackclub.com with “white rabbit” in the subject line with a 1 page cover letter on your background and why you think you’d be a great fit for this position.

Compensation range: $60K – $100K, depending on experience and fit. We offer healthcare.

– Christina Asquith, COO, and Zach Latta, Executive Director