Fully remote, full-time, based in the contiguous United States
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Apply for the Education Program Operations Manager position
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The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking someone who loves working with teenagers to run our high school summer program Progress in Medicine. Over the next couple of years, you'll grow this program to hundreds of students, and lay the foundation for scaling our education outreach to thousands of students.
RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has since been profiled by BBC and Vox, with our founder Jason Crawford as a key voice. Speakers at our annual Progress Conference include founders of billion-dollar companies, Nobel laureates in physics and economics, and heads of agencies like DARPA and OSTP; our writers fellowship includes influential voices on topics from AI policy to YIMBY reform to longevity technology. We also run a fellowship for progress writers, now in its fourth year. We have been doing all of this with a full-time team of five, which tells you something about how we operate—and we’re hiring to do even more.
In summer 2026, we launched a new summer career exploration program for teenagers, Progress in Medicine, which features several weeks of virtual instruction capped by a five-day in-residency program at Stanford University. It is the pilot program for a systematic educational campaign that aims to reorient teenagers from doom and anxiety toward agency and inspiration to help build a better tomorrow. We believe that ideas shape the future, often by changing how young people see the world and what purpose they pursue with their lives.
The pilot was a great success. We enrolled 30 ambitious, talented teens, showed them how people like them tackled medical problems in the past and built the modern world. We exposed them to ambitious builders in medicine, bio, longevity, and policy. By the end of the programs, this initial group of teens reported being more optimistic about the future, and being inspired to pursue different, more ambitious career paths in medicine.
As Education Program Operations Manager, you'll own operations for Progress in Medicine in 2027 and scale it from there: more cohorts, more topics, more universities. You'll run a smooth, efficient program that parents find trustworthy and students find transformative. You'll work closely with our curriculum leaders to choose advisors, near-peer mentors, company tour locations, and other partners. You'll work with Stanford, our current summer camp host, and help us build similar relationships with other top universities. That alone is a major, multi-year initiative.
Beyond that, we expect to create programs that will scale beyond the high-touch in-person experiences we lead, which can reach at most a few hundred students each year. This will be some combination of online programs, high school curricula, and career resources; our leadership team will research and decide the strategy in the coming year. If you join now, you’ll build the operational foundation and the reputation that will enable future growth. Depending on what you bring to the table, there’s a path here that grows into running a team and contributing to the future expansion.
This role reports to Heike Larson, our VP of Programs, and will work closely with the curriculum leader for the summer programs—Laura Mazer for Progress in Medicine.
You will be responsible for all operations for our high school educational programming:
You’re the person who makes sure the program runs flawlessly and safely for our students, and that parents have confidence in entrusting their teenagers to us.