Academic Coach, Alpha - $120,000/year USD

About Alpha

Alpha reimagines the school day around faster learning, stronger mentorship, and more time for students to build real-world skills. Alpha hires teachers (guides), operators, admissions experts, school & curriculum leaders, and remote team members. Education work that pays like it matters: Alpha offers six-figure roles for people ready to help build a radically better school experience. A culture built for builders: Alpha is fast-moving, ambitious, and student focused. It's for people who want to improve the system, not maintain it.

What You Will Be Doing

• Coaching students through app-based core learning: spotting who is stuck, asking the question that unblocks them, holding the daily goal.
• Running short structured-literacy sessions with two to four students. Diagnosing a phonics or decoding gap from running records and fluency probes, teaching a sequence you designed, and checking for transfer.
• Leading morning launch, life-skills workshops, and check-chart activities that keep six-year-olds moving.
• Driving students to their weekly app goals with school currency, leaderboards, and gamification.
• Staying with your students through lunch, recess, and closing, meeting frustration and refusal with a plan for that child.

What You Won't Be Doing

• Writing lesson plans for a full class every night. Your planning is narrow and diagnostic.
• Running a pull-out caseload from a quiet intervention room. Reading groups are about a tenth of your week and happen inside the day.
• Delivering a published curriculum or scripted program with fidelity to someone else's sequence.
• Writing IEPs, 504 plans, chasing testing paperwork, or sitting on curriculum committees.
• Slipping away to a prep block while someone else covers your students. You are with them launch to closing.

Academic Coach Key Responsibilities

Get every K-3 student to their daily learning goals, and close the reading gaps stopping them from getting there alone.

Basic Requirements

• Willing to work on-site at a campus listed above, with relocation support
• At least 3 years working directly with children ages 4-9: teaching, coaching, tutoring, camps, youth programs, children's theater, or similar settings where kids showed up because of you
• At least 2 years of that experience teaching reading in grades K-3, within the last 5 years
• Completed structured-literacy training: LETRS, IMSE, Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading System, Fundations, UFLI, CERI, Neuhaus, SIPPS, Really Great Reading, or similar; or a master's in reading or literacy
• Bachelor's degree in any subject. A teaching certificate is not required
• Comfortable spending about 90% of your day guiding students through app-based learning, workshops, and campus routines, and 10% on reading sessions
• Willing to work with all K-3 students, not only struggling readers
• Legally authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship

Nice-to-have Requirements

• You held a six-year-old's attention with nothing but your energy and an engaging activity
• You kept tired children coming back to an after-school reading program
• Parents asked for you by name
• Experience with reading platforms (Amira, Lexia, i-Ready) or diagnostic assessments (DRA, DIBELS, AIMSweb)
• You can name a child whose decoding you fixed and how

Current Openings

CA - Beverly Hills, La Jolla (San Diego), Malibu, Palo Alto, Piedmont, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and South Bay (Los Angeles) • CT - Greenwich • IL - Chicago • MA - Boston • NY - New York City • WA - Seattle

Interested in a different Alpha campus? Apply anyway and name your preferred location, and we will route you to the right opening.

Pay

$120,000 USD/year, paid weekly. This is a full-time, W2 employee position with immediate access to benefits. All roles are year-long positions.

Schedule

Full-time, on-site role, five days a week, at an Alpha campus. You are with your students from morning launch through closing, including lunch and recess.