Community Experience Lead

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Community Experience Lead based in South Africa.** As Community Experience Lead, you will own the long-term strategy and vision for a growing, multi-market community. You will shape the experience across the entire talent journey, from initial engagement and learning through to lifelong alumni participation. Leading a small, high-performing team, you will combine strategic thinking with hands-on execution and people development. You will work closely with senior leadership and cross-functional teams to align priorities, secure resources, and strengthen community impact. Data, member insights, and continuous improvement will guide your decisions and help demonstrate results. This is an opportunity to build scalable community systems while empowering local teams and members to create meaningful connections. The role is fully remote and suited to an autonomous, digitally connected professional comfortable working across regions and time zones. ### Accountabilities - Define and drive the long-term Community Experience strategy, ensuring it remains member-led, locally relevant, and embedded throughout the full talent lifecycle. - Develop and manage a strategic roadmap covering initiatives such as learner and alumni engagement, ambassador programmes, engagement tracking, knowledge hubs, and community resources. - Translate organisational priorities into clear community goals, plans, and investments, adapting the strategy as needs, budgets, and operating conditions evolve. - Lead and develop a small community team through clear objectives, regular feedback, coaching, performance management, and professional development. - Recruit and onboard additional community talent as the function grows, defining roles and resourcing needs in line with strategic priorities. - Remove execution blockers by resolving cross-functional dependencies, prioritisation challenges, and resource constraints. - Support and coach city-based Community Managers and Ambassadors, helping establish consistent standards, tools, and effective ways of working. - Act as the central voice for Community across the organisation, building strong partnerships with teams across loyalty, alumni relations, regional operations, brand, product, and learning delivery. - Represent Community priorities in leadership and planning discussions, securing stakeholder alignment, investment, and resources. - Identify and manage risks related to member engagement and communications, ensuring outreach remains coordinated and sustainable. - Own community performance reporting, including engagement, member satisfaction, programme impact, trends, and opportunities for improvement. - Establish and monitor KPIs, translating performance data into clear recommendations and narratives for senior stakeholders. - Manage the Community budget, including forecasting, expenditure tracking, and prioritisation of investments when resources are limited. - Benchmark community practices and engagement approaches against comparable organisations and incorporate relevant external insights into future strategy. ## Requirements - 5+ years of experience in community management, programme management, operations, or a related field, including at least 2 years in a people-management or team-leadership capacity. - Experience in education, technology, membership-based organisations, or similarly community-driven environments is highly valuable. - Proven ability to develop a strategy and turn it into an actionable roadmap that can be delivered by a small team. - Strong experience managing, coaching, and developing direct reports through goal setting, feedback, performance reviews, and career development. - Excellent stakeholder-management and influencing skills, with the ability to gain alignment from senior leaders and cross-functional teams without relying on direct authority. - Strong analytical and reporting capabilities, including defining KPIs, monitoring performance, interpreting trends, and communicating impact to non-technical stakeholders. - Hands-on experience with online community platforms such as Discourse, Circle, Slack, Discord, or similar tools. - Familiarity with member communications and engagement tools, including newsletter and email platforms such as Mailchimp or HubSpot. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the confidence to represent community priorities across a distributed organisation. - Ability to operate comfortably at both strategic and operational levels, moving between long-term planning, people leadership, and day-to-day problem solving. - Strong organisational skills, self-motivation, and the ability to work independently in a fully remote, digital-first environment. - Ability to collaborate effectively across multiple locations, cultures, and time zones. - Passion for community building, collaboration, inclusion, and creating meaningful member experiences. - Experience with community-led growth, ambassador, referral, or engagement programmes is a plus. - Experience with data visualisation or engagement analytics tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or similar is advantageous. - Background in budget management, programme investment, behavioural psychology, retention strategies, or multi-market distributed organisations is beneficial. ## Benefits - Fully remote working environment with flexibility to work digitally across locations and time zones. - High level of autonomy and ownership, with the opportunity to shape the community function and its long-term direction. - Opportunity to lead and develop a high-performing team while influencing community strategy across multiple markets. - Collaborative, impact-driven environment focused on innovation, experimentation, data, and continuous improvement. - Exposure to cross-functional leadership and the opportunity to influence organisational priorities at a senior level. - Opportunity to contribute to programmes designed to expand access to technology skills and strengthen career opportunities across Africa. - Flexible, digital-first ways of working supported by tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Gmail. - Full-time position with a strong emphasis on accountability, initiative, and sustainable performance. - Opportunities to build scalable community programmes, develop new approaches, and make a measurable impact on learner and alumni engagement.