Senior Director of Marketing and Growth

Job Description

Special Instructions to Applicants:

All interested applicants should attach a resume in the Supporting Documents section of the application, preferably in a PDF format to avoid any formatting issues. Please also include portfolio information. Please note that screening questions are a required portion of the application, if any are left blank or lack necessary responses your application will be disqualified.

About Rice:

Boasting a 300-acre tree-lined campus in Houston, Texas, Rice University is ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has a 6-to-1 undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio, and a residential college system, which supports students intellectually, emotionally and culturally through social events, intramural sports, student plays, lectures series, courses and student government. Developing close-knit, diverse college communities is a strong campus tradition, which is why Rice is highly ranked for best quality of life and best value among private universities.

Rice is also a wonderful place to work. Rice faculty, staff and students share values that are essential to our success as a healthy community. Those values guide our decisions and behaviors and shape Rice’s culture. They come through in the way we treat each other and the welcome we extend to our visitors. These values can be recalled simply by our name — RICE — Responsibility, Integrity, Community and Excellence.

About OpenStax:

OpenStax, an initiative of Rice University, is the world's largest nonprofit publisher of open educational resources. We have published more than 80 free, peer-reviewed digital textbooks now used at 72% of U.S. colleges and universities and in classrooms across 159 countries. We have saved students $3.4 billion on course materials, with the greatest impact on those at under-resourced high schools and community colleges, who have long faced steep barriers to academic success. Each year, we reach 16 million people through our website and 6.4 million students in formal courses.

That is the work that built us, and the trust that students, educators, and institutions place in OpenStax is the foundation we build on. The work ahead asks more. Education is changing rapidly, and we must prepare students for the courses, careers, and lives in front of them. Founded and led by a Rice professor, OpenStax is building AI-supported, research-informed teaching and learning experiences for high school, college, and the workforce. We also serve as the lead digital learning platform within SafeInsights, the nation's premier NSF-funded infrastructure for education research.

Our library is the foundation, and we are building on it. With Assignable, our teaching and learning platform, we are pairing that content with AI tools designed to support instructors and their students on how they actually learn. Through SafeInsights, we are working to understand what helps individual students succeed, and to apply what we learn to the products that instructors and students use every day. This is how we advance our mission to make an amazing education accessible for all.

Position Summary:

The Sr Director of Marketing & Growth within OpenStax at Rice University provides strategic leadership of OpenStax’s marketing function. This role joins OpenStax at a moment when AI is reshaping how students learn and how they find us. The Sr. Director will help define what that means for OpenStax's voice, visibility, and audience engagement, including building workflows, tooling, and channels that make it real. As a senior member of the OpenStax Leadership Team, this role shapes how OpenStax is positioned, understood, adopted, and championed by higher education faculty, K-12 educators, students, and institutional partners. The position leads a high-impact team while remaining hands-on in strategy, execution, and cross-functional collaboration—owning brand positioning, integrated multi-channel campaigns, educator engagement, institutional adoption, the strategic evolution of the OpenStax website, and go-to-market support for edtech products. The position has the authority to assess and evolve the structure of the marketing function over time, in partnership with the Leadership Team.

Ideal Candidate Statement:

The ideal candidate is a seasoned marketing leader with deep experience in mission-driven, education, technology, or high-growth environments. They balance long-term brand and market positioning with practical execution, and they are equally comfortable setting strategy with the Leadership Team and building alongside their team in the tools and systems that power the work. They have a strong track record of building brand awareness, audience engagement, and product adoption through integrated marketing, are fluent in using data and market insights to guide decisions, and are energized by the opportunity to expand educational access and affordability at scale.

Workplace Requirements:

This is a computer-intensive role performed in a remote home-office environment. Reliable high-speed internet access and a suitable, distraction-minimized workspace are required. Travel will be required for meetings, conferences, partner events, and team gatherings.

Workplace Location:

While residing in Houston is preferred due to proximity to Rice and OpenStax, this position is fully remote, permitting all tasks to be completed from any location within the United States. Working hours will remain central standard time. Per Rice policy 440, work arrangements may be subject to change.

This position is NOT classified as Essential.

Hiring Range:

Annual hiring range: $150,000 – $196,000 annually

Exempt (salaried) under FLSA — not eligible for overtime. This position is partially funded by a grant or restricted funds

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor’s Degree.
• Six or more (6+) years of experience in marketing, with progressive leadership responsibility.

Skills:

• Demonstrated success in managing a marketing function at a similar-sized or larger organization.
• Excellent presentation, verbal, visual, and written communication skills, including experience writing persuasive and promotional communications.
• Demonstrated ability to build strategic relationships and work effectively in a fast-paced environment as part of a creative, cross-functional team.
• Hands-on ability to create and deploy marketing materials.
• Strong knowledge of internal and external creative services and web development resources.
• Proven success in building, embedding, and extending a brand and brand positioning by building support with internal constituencies and driving the positioning among external audiences.
• Ability to use quantitative insights and market data to inform decision-making.
• Demonstrated experience leading and developing high-performing teams.

Preferences:

• 10+ years of marketing leadership experience, ideally within education, technology, mission-driven organizations, or high-growth environments.
• Experience managing and developing teams and know how to build alignment and momentum within lean organizations.
• Strategic and execution-oriented, comfortable setting long-term positioning, while remaining hands-on to move work forward, including direct contribution to campaigns, content, automations, and tooling when speed or quality demands it.
• Proven ability to build brand awareness, audience engagement, and product adoption through integrated marketing efforts, with the ability to measure and defend results.
• Experience across areas such as content marketing, digital marketing, email marketing, community engagement, and product or lifecycle marketing.
• Fluent in using quantitative and qualitative insights, market data, and experimentation to form hypotheses and guide decisions, rather than relying on intuition alone.
• Strong communicator and collaborator who works effectively across teams.
• Experience in higher education, K-12, educational technology, or open educational resources is preferred.
• Hands-on proficiency with marketing platforms (such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement), along with active engagement with the emerging tooling for AI search and LLM visibility (AIO/GEO).
• Demonstrated experience with the marketing, sales, and retention pipeline of a SaaS product in a freemium structure, including ownership of attribution and conversion metrics across the funnel.
• Active use and comfort with AI tools and their growing applications, such as designing, building, and evaluating agentic AI into marketing workflows, with a thoughtful approach to evaluating where they add value and where they don’t.

Essential Functions:

• Responsible for overseeing strategic communications and marketing initiatives and developing long-range plans and programs to meet organizational objectives.
• Helps guide and set departmental budget, goals, and objectives in alignment with organizational goals.
• Participates in university-wide and division-wide initiatives and cross-functional teams to establish the organization as a strategic partner and thought leader.
• Identifies available data to guide strategy and marketing effectiveness.
• Oversees the hiring, management, and mentoring of key staff.

Additional Functions:

• Develop and lead OpenStax’s marketing strategy across key audiences, including higher education and K-12 educators, students, and institutional partners, informed by audience and market data.
• Drive awareness, educator adoption, learner engagement, and institutional advocacy for OpenStax textbooks, OpenStax Assignable, and future digital learning offerings, with clear and measurable goals for each.
• Develop a deep, data-informed understanding of the evolving higher education, K-12, affordability, and OER landscapes, including how educators evaluate and adopt instructional resources.
• Lead and develop a high-performing marketing team by setting clear priorities, building strong collaboration, and supporting professional growth.
• Own and evolve OpenStax’s brand positioning and messaging within the educational technology and open educational resources landscape, with mechanisms to measure brand health over time.
• Lead the strategic evolution of the OpenStax website as both a marketing platform and a core product experience, ensuring it effectively delivers educational content, supports educator and student engagement, communicates institutional value, and drives adoption across audiences, supported by clear instrumentation, conversion analytics, and a working understanding of the underlying web architecture and content management system.
• Direct and coordinate integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns that increase reach, engagement, and adoption across educator and learner audiences, with cohesive campaign architectures where individual tactics ladder up to clearly defined organizational priorities, supported by consistent attribution and measurement standards across all channels.
• Partner closely with Product teams to support launches, feature adoption, lifecycle engagement, and go-to-market strategies for new learning products and capabilities.
• Collaborate with Analytics and Research teams as an active partner, translating user insights, market trends, and performance data into testable hypotheses, measurable strategies, and decision-making.
• Partner with the Development team on community giving campaigns, contributing brand, audience, and channel expertise to philanthropic outreach.
• Collaborate with Rice University and SafeInsights colleagues on shared priorities, including cross-initiative campaigns and the broader AI for Education efforts with Rice.
• Contribute as a member of the Leadership Team to organizational strategy, annual planning, prioritization, and cross-functional decision-making.
• Optimize AI and LLM visibility as emerging marketing channels, including the measurement framework needed to evaluate impact.
• Lead the centralization of marketing and growth strategy within the organization
• Partner with program, product, and technology teams on roadmap
• Define and optimize pipeline conversion from awareness through retention, supported by a defensible attribution model that you would own.
• Performs other duties as assigned in support of OpenStax and Rice department and program objectives, including ad-hoc representation of OpenStax at conferences, partner events, and donor engagements where marketing leadership presence is required.