Start Date: Immediate
Role Type: Full-time
Travel: ~1-2 trips per month, with some ebbs and flows throughout the year
Reports to: Ross Lescano Lipstein

Who We Are

Transcend is a national nonprofit that helps communities reimagine and redesign schools so every young person can thrive in a rapidly changing world. Across the country, communities are recognizing that classrooms built for the industrial age aren’t preparing learners for what’s next. Instead, schools must be designed for continuous evolution: relevant, resilient, and ready for the future. For more than a decade, Transcend has partnered with school and system leaders to build the capacity for bold, lasting change—change led by the people who live it every day. We’ve worked with nearly 500 schools and 200 districts serving over 225,000 students in 35 states. Together, we’ve seen what’s possible when communities lead redesign with proven methods, insight, and support. From that work, we develop and share tools, research, and models that help schools everywhere make the leap to extraordinary learning—for every child, in every community.

For more information, visit our website or follow us on LinkedIn.

The Role

Transcend’s Program team is a ‘learning & building engine’ within Transcend: we hold what must consistently occur across our partnerships with schools & systems, and we compile the tools & resources that enable those things to consistently occur. To do this well, we engage in constant cycles of learning from/with partnerships in action, gathering artifacts and insights that inform the next iteration of Transcend’s shared perspectives and supports.

The team consists of four main programmatic focuses:

• Org foundations: the key terms, concepts, beliefs, and frameworks that underlie all of our design-journey work and supports
• The ‘what’ (usable knowledge): information and tools addressing the design choices that communities make on their journeys
• The ‘how (journey supports)’: information and tools addressing the change process that communities undertake in design journeys
• Tech & innovation: tending to the common tech-enabled tools (incl. AI-enabled tools) and infrastructure that creatively weave together foundations, what, and how.

The Program team is seeking a hybrid ‘chief of staff’ and ‘special projects lead’ to increase the coherence, speed, and impact of Transcend’s Program team by strengthening product development, cross-team coordination, and program foundations. This role is not intended to be static or rigid, and given the nature of a ‘chief of staff’ and ‘special projects / strategy’ set of work, we can’t fully anticipate everything involved, and can shape some aspects of the role together.

This role would do at least the following:

• [likely ~20% of the role in the first year] Act as a ‘jack of all trades’ to drive forward key priorities for the tech & innovation work in the Program team, ranging from fleshing out product vision to sketching initial solutions to gathering feedback and insights from users. This involves deeply understanding the product vision and user perspectives, and balancing drawing on Transcend’s work to date with exercising creativity to push toward the next evolution of that work.
• [likely ~20% of the role in the first year] Work closely with the Tech & Innovation team to drive an agile process of envisioning, building, testing, and learning from tech products and features that make design journeys much more accessible and impactful. This includes coordinating product development priorities and process, as well as driving some of the on-the-ground user testing and learning as products and features are prototyped and piloted.
• [likely ~15-20% of the role in the first year] Drive strong coordination between Program functions and other teams at Transcend, including with the teams that partner directly with schools & systems, as well as the teams that drive partnership development & fundraising, capacity building, communications & network engagement, and strategy & evidence. This includes setting up and improving coordination structures & routines across teams, ensuring robust learning loops, noticing and addressing gaps & opportunities, and facilitating groups toward more clarity & alignment.
• [likely ~10-15% of the role in the first year] Help us fully synthesize and gap-fill our foundational schemas and concepts across Transcend’s entire program. This includes driving us to clarity, alignment, and implications related to how we’ve schematized the design of the learning environment, community conditions, learner outcomes, district central office setup, and more. Transcend has about 80% of this in place, but we need help pulling together the other 20% and fortifying and elaborating it all into a more robust and coherent programmatic foundation. Again, while part of this work is tactical, the best fit for this role will also have the strategic mind and understanding of school transformation required to drive improvements to the content of foundations as well.
• [likely ~10% of the role in the first year] Help us stay on the learning curve related to AI tools & possibilities, including spending some time spinning up prototypes that we can user-test in a variety of ways, and playing with edge-of-field capabilities like agent teams and AI-enabled video generation. This role would not be the only one that’s doing this learning and experimentation, but it would certainly be one of them. This will require that you be willing to roll up your sleeves and build, exercise creativity, and explore opportunities that push Transcend’s program forward while cohering with what we have.
• Other responsibilities in the first year likely include:
• Building a thorough understanding of Transcend’s program and the perspectives and styles of key leaders on the Program team (Chief Program Officer, heads of usable knowledge, journey supports, and tech) such that you can do everything above, as well as represent these leaders in internal and external settings when needed
• Plan and facilitate teaming experiences for the program team and/or program leadership, ranging from periodic offsites to more regular syncing (this means at times, directly planning and executing operations and other times directing the execution of operations via a teammate or contractor)
• Support packaging & communicating of program work to audiences like funders, Transcend Board (entire Board, and its program committee), and others

Who You Are

You’re a strategic and practical builder who loves helping ambitious ideas become clearer, stronger, and more actionable. You’re at your best when working across teams, connecting dots, bringing order to complexity, and helping people move from good intentions to real progress. You enjoy roles that sit at the intersection of strategy, execution, and innovation, and you are comfortable both crafting visions and strategy as well as rolling up your sleeves and executing with excellence. You know how to bring structure without creating bureaucracy, and you have a knack for helping groups get clearer, more aligned, and more effective.

You’re excited by the chance to help Transcend’s Program team operate with greater coherence, stronger learning loops, and better tools and supports for school communities. You’re also energized by emerging technologies, including AI, and you’re eager to explore how new tools and approaches can meaningfully improve our work and increase our impact.

To all of this, you bring many of the following strengths, experiences, and orientations:

Experiences

• You’ve led complex, cross-functional work involving multiple teams, leaders, or workstreams.
• You’ve managed high-priority projects from early shaping through execution, iteration, and follow-through.
• You’ve worked in roles that required both strategic thinking and hands-on execution.
• You’ve helped improve how teams work by setting up or refining processes, rhythms, and coordination structures.
• You’ve facilitated meetings, workshops, or planning sessions that helped groups reach greater clarity and alignment.
• You’ve worked closely with product, design, and/or technical teams to shape tools, features, or new initiatives.
• You’ve gathered feedback directly from users or stakeholders and used it to improve what gets built.
• You’ve synthesized complex information into clear frameworks, recommendations, or plans.
• You’ve worked well in ambiguity and know how to move things forward before everything is fully defined.
• You’ve used AI tools in practical ways to support your thinking, workflow, prototyping, or execution.

Skills

• Strong strategic judgment and the ability to quickly identify what matters most.
• Excellent project leadership, including scoping work, setting priorities, coordinating contributors, and driving follow-through.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and the ability to work effectively with people who bring different expertise and perspectives.
• Excellent facilitation skills; you know how to lead meetings and working sessions that create real momentum.
• Strong synthesis skills; you can turn scattered inputs, ideas, and feedback into something coherent and useful.
• Clear, persuasive communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Ability to build strong learning loops by gathering signal, spotting patterns, and helping teams improve over time.
• Comfort moving between big-picture strategy and day-to-day execution.
• Strong product instincts, especially around discovery, prototyping, testing, and iteration.
• Comfort experimenting with AI-enabled tools and emerging technologies, with a practical eye for what is actually useful.
• Strong organizational instincts: you notice gaps, dependencies, risks, and opportunities early.

Knowledge

• Familiarity with product development processes, especially iterative approaches grounded in prototyping, testing, and feedback.
• Understanding of how effective cross-functional organizations work, including how to support good decisions, communication, and coordination.
• Familiarity with user-centered design, service design, and/or workflow design principles.
• Understanding of how to translate field learning into stronger tools, frameworks, and supports.
• Familiarity with AI tools and emerging capabilities, and curiosity about how they can improve internal work and user-facing experiences.
• Ideally, some knowledge of K–12 education, school system change, nonprofit organizations, or community-centered design.

Orientations

• Deep alignment with Transcend’s mission and excitement about helping young people thrive in a changing world.
• A strong commitment to living into Transcend’s core values.
• Curiosity, sound judgment, and a love of making sense of complex systems and ideas.
• A proactive, resourceful approach; you step in and help move things forward.
• A strong service orientation; you care more about impact than spotlight.
• Comfort with ambiguity, iteration, and learning through testing and feedback.
• Calm, steady presence in fast-moving or uncertain situations.
• A bias toward clarity, usefulness, and follow-through.
• Excitement about helping a mission-driven organization learn faster, work better, and build smarter.

Application & Hiring Process

We review applications on a rolling basis and are committed to a thoughtful and people-centered hiring experience that helps candidates feel what it’s like to work at Transcend. Here’s a sample hiring process at Transcend; the stages for this individual role may vary:

• Initial interview with the team via Zoom to learn more about your interest and experiences.
• Try-on activity to engage in a role-aligned exercise or an artifact submission discussion. This helps us get a sense of how you approach the work and gives you a feel for what the role might be like.
• Interview with the team, where you will meet with a small group of Transcend teammates with whom you would most likely collaborate in the role.
• Final interview with our Chief Program Officer.
• Reference checks to learn more about your superpowers and working style.

Salary

As a national team, we apply a cost-of-labor adjustment by adjusting salaries into 3 geographical bands (geo-band) in order to offer competitive compensation for all employees across the US. These geo-bands help us tailor compensation appropriately based on the specific location of each teammate. Below are the three salary geo-bands for this role, and we will confirm the individual range for your location during the initial interview, if you move forward in the process.

• Geo Comp 1: Currently Includes: NYC metro area, CA Bay Area, Boston City, LA City, Washington, D.C, Seattle $140,000-$195,000
• Geo Comp 2: Currently includes locations such as: San Diego; New Haven, CT; Ventura, CA $133,000-$185,250
• Geo Comp 3: Currently Includes: Most other US locations $126,000-$175,500

A Few Nuts & Bolts

We are an experienced team focused on extraordinary learning for all. We welcome candidates who are passionate about ensuring that all students thrive. We are also committed to providing our colleagues with a competitive benefits package and offer medical, dental, and vision coverage options, org-wide holidays, paid time off, paid parental leave, professional development opportunities, and fully remote work. We take pride in our collaborative environment, exceptional team, and shared commitment to principled, impactful work.

We look forward to learning more about you!