Founding Solutions Lead

About Protagonist

Protagonist is building an AI-native guidance platform that helps colleges and universities design, own, and govern deeply personalized student experiences—across enrollment, advising, persistence, and career navigation.

We are not retrofitting AI onto legacy workflows. We are designing a new, institution-grade intelligence layer—built around learner memory, orchestration between AI and humans, and institutional governance from first principles.

Protagonist is led by a repeat founder, Charles Thornburgh, who has previously built category-defining companies in education technology. The company combines deep domain experience with a conviction that AI enables a fundamentally new approach to how student guidance systems are designed, governed, and scaled.

We are early, working with a small set of design-partner institutions, and actively launching our first production pilots.

The Role

We are looking for a Founding Solutions Lead to be our primary forward-deployed resource — the person who goes deep inside institutions, earns the trust of their teams, and does the hard work of understanding their challenges, building the case for change, and scoping what it will take to create real impact.

This is a strategic, field-facing role that sits at the intersection of institutional co-design and go-to-market execution. You will work directly with presidents, provosts, enrollment leaders, and student success teams — and serve as connective tissue between our institutional partners and the rest of the company, translating field learning into product direction and go-to-market strategy.

The best people in this role combine consulting-level rigor with the commercial instincts and self-starting energy that come from operating in high-growth or early-stage environments.

What You’ll Do

Lead Institutional Co-Design Engagements (Primary focus in year one)

• Lead institutional engagements end-to-end: structured discovery, workflow mapping, business case development, pilot scoping, and launch

• Translate institutional goals, constraints, and student outcomes into clear use cases and well-defined pilots

• Build trusted relationships across the full institutional stakeholder map — leadership, enrollment, student success, IT, and operations

• Ensure pilots create meaningful learning and momentum for both Protagonist and the institution

Own Client Success

• Personally own client success across active engagements — ensuring institutions realize value and want to expand

• Lead ongoing engagement rhythms: check-ins, quarterly reviews, impact analysis, and results communication

• Build reference partners and develop the case studies, narratives, and success stories that anchor credibility with prospective institutions and support the company's go-to-market motion.

Lead GTM Strategy and Execution (Increasing focus as the engagement model matures)

• Own Protagonist's institution-facing positioning and marketing materials — the primary assets used to engage, educate, and convert prospective partners

• Build and maintain the sales and expansion playbook: how we engage institutions, scope pilots, structure contracts, and drive toward renewal and expansion

• Own pricing and packaging strategy, informed directly by what you're learning in the field about institutional willingness to pay, expansion triggers, and value realization

• Partner closely with the CEO on late-stage partnership conversations where solution credibility and scoping matter most

• Bring structured field insights back into product and ICP — serving as the primary market-facing input into what Protagonist builds and how it sells

Who You Are

• 7–10+ years in a market-facing role with direct accountability for customer outcomes — solution consulting, sales engineering, or client success

• Knowledge of higher education, student success, or learning — and a genuine hunger to build deep expertise in institutional dynamics, stakeholder environments, and what it actually takes to drive change in this sector

• A strong structured thinker who can take complex institutional challenges and turn them into clear, actionable engagements

• Credible and confident working with senior leaders; able to facilitate strategic conversations and workshops at the executive level

• Commercially oriented — you understand how to build a business case, identify what matters to a buyer, and drive an engagement toward signed contracts and expanded relationships, not just well-received recommendations

• A self-starting doer who is energized by doing the work, comfortable operating without a playbook, and actively curious about how AI tools can change the way you work — you experiment, incorporate them into your workflow, and think seriously about what they make possible