Research Assistant, Alpha - $100,000/year USD

If you have coached youth sports, run a cabin at camp, or tutored a kid who wanted to quit, the last step before an offer is a full day on campus coaching real Alpha students.

About the role

At Alpha, students learn academics through AI-powered adaptive learning apps. No lectures. No textbooks. No whiteboard. Motivation and life skills, the two things schools normally squeeze into the margins, are the whole job here.

Picture a Tuesday. Half your day you run one-hour workshops for a K-8 cohort on public speaking, focus, and how to give and receive real feedback. The other half you sit with those same students one-on-one or in small groups, read their Coachbot analytics, and push each of them to 100% of their weekly app goals, using school currency, leaderboards, and the relationship you have built with them to break through resistance.

Your quarter comes down to three numbers: every student in your cohort hits their weekly app goals, every student passes the Test2Pass mastery check for each workshop, and 90% or more say they love you. Missing one of the three is missing the job.

This is a full-time, on-site role at one of Alpha's campuses. Current openings for this salary tier are available in Scottsdale, AZ; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, OK; Nashville, TN; Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, Houston, and Brownsville, TX; Springfield, MA; and Park City, UT. If you're interested in another Alpha campus, apply anyway and tell us your preferred location—we'll consider you for the appropriate opening.

Responsibilities

• Leading one-hour life-skills workshops for K-8 cohorts on public speaking, focus, and giving and receiving feedback
• Running daily 1:1 and small-group motivation sessions that push every student to 100% of their weekly app goals, using Coachbot analytics and Alpha's incentive systems (school currency, leaderboards)
• Administering the Test2Pass mastery assessment for each life skill, then re-coaching any student who does not pass until they do
• Adapting the workshop playbook, and building new sessions when you find a gap, so the same material lands with a kindergartener and with an 8th grader
• Being both the adult who holds the standard and the adult your students choose to talk to
• Ensure every student in your K-8 cohort hits their weekly learning goals, masters each life skill, and leaves the year saying they loved school

What You Won’t Be Doing

• Lecturing at a whiteboard, writing math and reading lesson plans, or grading homework; academic instruction lives in the apps
• Running standardized test prep or answering for a class-wide test score
• Handling parent conferences, emails, and complaints; campus leadership owns all parent-facing work
• Crowd-controlling 30 students at once; cohorts are small and behavior work here is 1:1 coaching
• Supervising kids at computers; motivation here is active and personal

Requirements

• Willing to work in person at an Alpha campus in Scottsdale, AZ; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, OK; Nashville, TN; Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, Houston, and Brownsville, TX; Springfield, MA; or Park City, UT (relocation support provided)
• Bachelor's degree in any subject
• At least 3 years working directly with K-8 (elementary and middle school) students: classroom teaching, tutoring, athletic coaching, camp leadership, or youth program work
• Comfortable letting adaptive learning software deliver the academic instruction while you own motivation and life-skills coaching
• A personal record of high achievement, academic, athletic, or professional, that made holding a hard standard a habit rather than a posture
• Stage presence strong enough to hold a room of 12-year-olds for an hour without raising your voice
• Legal right to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

Nice-to-have

• Youth athletics coaching, debate, drama, camp leadership, or after-school program work where you were personally accountable for kids hitting a specific goal
• Experience teaching social-emotional learning (SEL) or durable-skills curricula
• A student you can name who went from resistant or checked out to fully engaged, and the specific thing you did
• Daily use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini

About Alpha

Join the team building school around student growth. Alpha reimagines the school day around faster learning, stronger mentorship, and more time for students to build real-world skills. Roles with real student impact: 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. Alpha is where you can do the most meaningful work of your career.

Pay

$100,000 USD/year, paid weekly.

Benefits

Full-time, W2 employee position with immediate access to benefits. All roles are year-long positions.