GTME Ecosystem - Certifications & Badges Lead

ABOUT CLAY

Our mission is to help organizations turn any growth idea into reality.

We see growth as a creative practice, not a formula. Finding and reaching your best-fit customers takes unique ideas and constant iteration. As AI makes execution faster and tactics easier to copy, creativity is the only lasting advantage. We're already helping thousands of customers https://clayrun.notion.site/Wall-of-Love-b243f2b67607438b9fad99341e6b8d47 — including Anthropic, Notion, Google, and Ramp — go to market with unique data, signals, and AI research.

In 2025, we raised a $100M Series C https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.htmlbacked by world-class investors including Sequoia, CapitalG, and First Round — and crossed $100M in revenue.

In 2026, we announced our second employee tender offer https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/dealbook/clay-start-up-tender-offers.html in 9 months at a new $5B valuation. We also launched a community equity round https://www.clay.com/blog/community-equity-offering, for our customers, agency partners, and club members.

Some things to know about us:

• Our community http://community.clay.com includes 11,000+ customers, 150+ integration partners, 125+ agencies, 50+ Clay clubs https://luma.com/claylive, and 30k members on Slack.

• Our culture https://nextplayso.substack.com/p/spotlight-clay is unique inside and outside of work. Our team members are also DJs, activists, writers, clowns, marathoners, skydivers, psychedelic therapists, social workers, and more.

• All employees can work for free with world-class coaches who specialize in creativity, management, and more.

• Our operating principles — including negative maintenance and non-attached action — guide our work. Read more about them here https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61477f2c24a826836f969afe/685d83a71452245cc1129791_4d770abfd83e276ec15315a2e06945bd_Clay2025_OperatingPrinciples.pdf.

• Read about us in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/dealbook/clay-ai-marketing-fundraise.html, Forbes http://google.com/search?q=forbes+clay&rlz=1C5OZZY_enUS1155US1155&oq=forbes+clay&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABNIBBzkzM2owajSoAgOwAgHxBVAe8UAxJx_p&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8, First Round Review https://review.firstround.com/podcast/inside-clays-unconventional-path-to-1-25b/, and more https://www.clay.com/press.

Hear from our employees directly on our Glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Clay-EI_IE9850794.11,15.htm page!

ABOUT CLAY CREDENTIALING

Credentialing is how the GTME Ecosystem turns skill into opportunity. Our vision is a world where GTM Engineering is a profession people can build a career on — with Clay as the institution that recognizes the work, validates the skill, and opens the doors. Certifications carry Clay's stamp of approval and stay tightly bound to demonstrated mastery; while badges recognize meaningful engagement across the whole ecosystem — community, content, peer review, and building in the platform. Together they make the constellation of GTME learning easy to understand and navigate. They connect people to opportunity and opportunity to people.

This is a mini-founder role. You'll inherit a mid-flight program — a professional certification just wrapping beta, a peer-review and grading pipeline, vendor relationships, and a credentialing portal — and you'll think about all of it the way a founder thinks about their product. That means owning:

• Certification design & rigor — job task analysis, assessment philosophy, rubrics, and the hybrid quiz-plus-workbook model that keeps the bar high without rubber-stamping

• The badge system — a constellation (not a linear path) that rewards community participation, content creation, peer review, and program completion, and that feeds PLG and the community flywheel

• Grading & operations — the peer-review council, calibration, SLAs, round-robin review, and the Clay tables and automations that run it

• Tooling & vendors — the certification portal, plus relationships and decisions across vendors like Accredible and Yoodli

• Cross-functional credentialing — solutions partner certification, enterprise partner enablement, and the data plumbing (SFDC objects, GTMOps) that makes it all legible

• Measurement — credentials issued, completion and pass rates, time-to-feedback, and downstream hireability signals

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the credentialing strategy end to end. You'll hold the line on what certifications mean and what badges mean, define the tiers (from community and skill badges to solutions certificates and professional certifications), and build the roadmap that takes a learner from interested student to credentialed practitioner.

• Keep certifications ultra-premium. Certs are resume-worthy credentials, so the process should not be easy. You'll happily pay the friction tax — designing assessments, rubrics, and review standards that prize rigor over accessibility, and that companies hiring Clay talent can actually trust.

• Build the badge ecosystem from the ground up. You'll work with the Clay team to design the buckets for badges (programs, community, content, platform), define what each badge unlocks, and make badges a forcing function for the behaviors that grow the community.

• Run and scale the grading pipeline. You'll own the operational backbone: peer-review council, calibration, review rotations, SLAs (~1 week from submission), and the Clay tables and automations that let a small team review at quality and at volume.

• Own the tooling and vendor stack. You'll make the build-vs-buy calls, manage the credentialing portal, and drive vendor decisions (Accredible vs. Credly, the Yoodli pilot, and whatever comes next) with a clear point of view.

• Make credentials a cross-functional asset. You'll stand up the solutions partner certification, support enterprise partner enablement, and partner with GTMOps and Sales so credentials show up where they create demand and supply.

• Build in public. You'll market the program, ship reconfirmation and comms cadences, and turn credentialing into a defensible flywheel for the GTME brand.

WHO YOU ARE

• A builder with a founder's gut. You can design the rubric and run the grading session, write the candidate comms and make the vendor call. You take deep personal ownership over the integrity of every credential you put Clay's name on.

• Obsessed with rigor and trust. You understand that a credential is only as valuable as the standard behind it, and that the standard is evolving ever-faster in an AI-native job world.

• A systems thinker who can still ship scrappy. You thrive in mutually exclusive, completely exhaustive frameworks, while also understanding that no system is perfect – the best way to gather data and learn is to ship fast.

• A learner first. When a frontier model drops, you're playing with it that evening, and you're constantly re-examining what "good" looks like as the target moves.

• Comfortable in ambiguity. There's no established playbook for credentialing an emerging discipline. We are here to create something net-new in industry – and you’re excited to lead (and define) the charge.

WHO YOU ARE NOT

• A rubber-stamp operator. If your instinct is to maximize completions and hand out color, we're solving different problems. You protect the value of the credential, even (especially?) when that means telling people no.

• A strategist who doesn't execute. You'll write the assessment philosophy and then build the rubric, grade the submissions, and troubleshoot the portal the night before a launch. Mini-founder means owning the fulfilling and the tedious.

• A systematizer before a prover. You run the scrappy version, learn, then scale what works.

LOCATION

This role is ideally based in NYC and in-person with the GTME Ecosystem team. Open to remote for truly exceptional candidates — but bias is heavily toward NYC.