Director, Community Systems

The Role

This role reports to the Partner, Capital at Praxis. As the Director, Community Systems, you will build and lead the system that cultivates a community of connected relationships eager to build ventures and projects together. The Director is an architect and operator of systems rooted in the conviction that compounding impact over time is made possible by the curation of a dense network of founders, funders, creatives, thinkers, and builders. The Director owns two connected systems: how the community is recruited, formed, and activated, and how the needs of select ventures and projects are surfaced, matched, and fulfilled through the community's abundance of expertise, capacity for mentorship, introductions to talent, and financial capital. They also equip members of the Praxis team to do the deeply personal work inside those systems.

The value of this role is that the loop runs as one system with one accountable lead, rather than two functions passing information across a gap.

Key Areas of Responsibility

Community Cultivation (~50%)

Helps lead and design the architecture and operation of how Praxis recruits and cultivates the community across regions, enabling the team to spend their limited relational capital in meaningful ways while building systems to carry the work elsewhere.

• Build and maintain the community management model, organizing the community by roles, interests, engagements, etc. and the processes for personal recruitment and cultivation.
• Own the data layer that makes the community understandable: the key data inputs and community management processes, and a structured view of who can contribute what (deployable capital, network and domain reach, expertise and mentoring capacity), captured through the relationship work itself rather than layered on top of it.
• Design and run the operating rhythms: Community portfolio sizing and assignment, touchpoint standards, and the pipeline directory that invites people into relevant programs, events, and opportunities for engagement.
• Equip and coach the team members who are the frontline of the community - giving them the tools, briefs, prompts, and dashboards that make personal outreach more informed and less administrative, without ever scripting what must stay personal.
• Work with the Systems Lead to develop AI agents and AI-enabled workflows that support community managers in the personal cultivation of community relationships; hold the line that certain interactions and invitations should remain relational and personal.
• Protect the Community Principles - people over projects, givers before takers - as the ceiling on how the system is used.

Community-Driven Venture and Project Support (~50%)

Working with the Accelerator and Studio teams, surface the needs of select ventures and projects and activate the community towards them - capital (investment or philanthropy), talent introductions, expertise, mentorship, and shared project work.

• Build and run the intake by which needs are surfaced, working directly with the Accelerator teams, Capital Fellowship team, and the Redemptive Imagination Project team so that needs are known in a consistent, usable form rather than as ad hoc requests.
• Maintain the criteria for which ventures and projects warrant community activation, so that the community's contributions are concentrated to strategic opportunities.
• Qualify each need into a specific, well-formed invitation: what kind of contribution, how much, by when, what a good contributor looks like, etc.
• Design and execute the strategy by which needs are matched against the community's capacity and route each match through the appropriate team relationship, ensuring the invitation is personal and specific.
• Close the loop: track fulfillment, report back to ventures and to community members and make visible what the community's contributions made possible.
• Aggregate patterns - recurring gaps in expertise, capital, or geography - and feed them back upstream to inform who Community Management recruits and prioritizes.
• Treat each fulfilled outcome as the beginning of the next: make visible the journeys by which a Fellow becomes a mentor, a mentor becomes a funder, and a contributor becomes an exemplar who draws others in.

What You Bring to the Role

• An ecology/systems orientation: you see a community, a pipeline, or a portfolio as a system that can be designed and cultivated and you are energized by encouraging the system rather than being the driver.
• Fluency with data and tooling: comfort working in CRM schemas and workflows, building dashboards and reporting, and working with the Systems Lead to evaluate and build where automation and AI can responsibly reduce friction.
• Operating experience in a relationship-driven environment (community, ecosystem, development, partnerships, or portfolio operations) enough to respect what must stay personal and to design systems that serve it.
• The ability to lead and coach a team of relationship-oriented people, and to earn the trust of team members who carry the frontline, by making their work more effective rather than more bureaucratic.
• Strategic judgment on both sides of the role, able to discern what ventures and projects need and what the community can realistically offer, and match accordingly.
• Relational credibility sufficient to work well with funders, founders, and mentors, even though the role's leverage is in the system rather than in carrying a personal portfolio.

Additional DetailsLocation: Strong preference for New York City-based candidates; remote role considered for outstanding candidates

Travel: Team meetings (typically held at Praxis HQ in New York City), annual Praxis Summit, and additional travel for Regional Gatherings, program events, and other community gatherings; 30-40 days annually. All travel expenses covered by Praxis.

Reports To: Partner, Capital

Compensation Package: $125K - $155k based on experience and location

• Comprehensive benefits including fully paid health insurance for families
• 5% matching 401k
• Flexible vacation policy

For all Praxis roles, we are open to candidates who are 'outside of range'. Growth-minded applicants at earlier career stages or candidates with experience above the highest end of the job description are welcome and encouraged to apply.