Communications Lead

Communications- Lead

Social Alpha

Bengaluru / Delhi Reporting to: CEO

What this role is not

This is not a job for someone who manages agencies, vendors, briefs designers, and writes press releases. AI does most of that now. This is not a job for someone who treats communication as a support function, a decorative layer applied after the real work is done. It is not an advertising or PR role. And it is not a job for someone who prefers a slow, consensus-driven process to ship anything.

What this role is

Social Alpha operates at the hardest frontier of social innovation: where science meets communities and markets, where capital meets patience, and where the gap between what works in the lab and what reaches the last mile is measured in years and broken systems. We need someone who can see that work clearly, understand it deeply, and translate it without oversimplifying for the world outside.

The Head of Communications is an intellectual and as well highly hands on and operational role. You are the person who reads our data, understands our programs and portfolio, absorbs our frameworks, and builds our narratives not press materials, not social posts, but coherent, durable stories across climate change, healthcare and livelihoods and their intersections, and the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in addressing them.

You move fast. You deploy a team managed part in-house, part external and every AI tool available to give those narratives form, reach, and resonance. Quickly.

What you will do

Narrative and editorial

Own the editorial intelligence of Social Alpha: what we say, why we say it, to whom, and in what register

Develop and maintain the narrative architecture of the organisation the deep thought through-lines that connect our 10-year journey, our portfolio, our programs, our capital philosophy, and our institutional identity

Write, or have strong enough judgment to shape, long-form communication: essays, reports, impact narratives, op-eds, letters to major stakeholders (the list doesn't end here)

Translate complex, technical, and systems-level work into language that funders, policymakers, media, and ecosystem partners can engage with without dumbing it down

Collaborate closely with the senior leadership on positioning, thought leadership, and critical stakeholder communications

Team and production

Lead and orchestrate a mixed team (on role staff and freelancers) of content writers, graphic designers, video creators, and external agencies managing them as a highperformance, on-demand unit rather than a fixed production line

Know when to use in-house talent, when to engage agencies, and when AI alone is sufficient, and make those calls fast

Maintain quality standards and brand coherence across all outputs regardless of who produces them

Build workflows and briefs that allow the team to move at the speed the organisation needs

AI and tools

Be fluent in AI tools for research synthesis, content structuring, design direction, and production. Build an AI-augmented communication function that punches well above its weight

Actively identify where AI can replace, accelerate, or elevate the teams work and act on it without waiting to be asked

Operations and responsiveness

Operate in mission mode: bias toward action, short turnaround, decisions made with available information rather than perfect information because the organisations needs dont wait for perfect conditions

Respond to the organisations communication needs in near real-time whether that is a funder ask, a media moment, a portfolio milestone, or a leadership communication

Build a communication function that is lean, fast, and structurally capable of scaling output without scaling headcount proportionally

What we are looking for

A genuine love of ideas and a demonstrated ability to read and understand, complex material across science, development economics, technology, grassroots action, and policy

Exceptional writing ability: clear, precise, unafraid of a strong point of view

Proven experience managing and directing creative teams with high standards and low tolerance for drift

Intellectual humility combined with narrative confidence you can hold complexity without flattening it

A working command of AI tools (LLMs, design generation, research and synthesis tools) and a natural instinct to use them to extend the teams capabilities

Experience in research, journalism, academic communication, think-tank publishing, or high-quality institutional communication not necessarily all of these, but the sensibility that comes from one of them

An ability to understand Social Alphas model non-profit, operating philanthropy, lab-tomarket transitions, blended capital, embedded incubation at a level of genuine comprehension, not surface familiarity

Comfort operating in a high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment where speed and judgment matter more than process and sign-off chains

What we do not need

Someone whose primary instinct is to post, promote, and amplify. Someone who measures success in follower counts. Someone who needs three weeks and two rounds of approval to publish anything. Someone who outsources thinking to a content calendar. Someone who reaches for AI and search tools before reading and learning about the work we do and its context. Someone who thinks we need a large budget and an army of agencies and consultants. Someone who will use network and connections to reach out to us for this job without following the application guidelines below.

How to apply

Find out more about Social Alpha from the following public links:

Our website: https://www.socialalpha.org/

Newsletters: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/work-in-progress-7226190128241635328/ Founders posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkbhatt/recent-activity/all/

Archives: https://www.socialalpha.org/newsletters/