Youth Development Specialist, Alpha - $100,000/year USD

About the role

Alpha is hiring a Youth Development Specialist to work full-time, on-site at one of our campuses. You will lead life-skills workshops and one-on-one motivation sessions for K-8 students, using AI-powered adaptive learning apps for academics while you focus entirely on motivation, life skills, and personal coaching. Your success is measured by three numbers: every student hits weekly app goals, every student passes mastery checks for each workshop, and 90% or more say they love you.

What you will be doing

• 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

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

Key responsibilities

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.

Basic requirements

• Willing to work in person at an Alpha campus in Scottsdale, AZ; Oklahoma City or Tulsa, OK; Nashville, TN; or Austin, Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, or Brownsville, TX — 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 requirements

• 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

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. Alpha offers six-figure roles for people ready to help build a radically better school experience. Alpha is fast-moving, ambitious, and student focused — it's for people who want to improve the system, not maintain it.

Pay and schedule

• $100,000 USD/year, paid weekly
• Full-time, W2 employee position with immediate access to benefits
• Year-long role