Public Funding Project Lead

Outschool, Inc.

2d

About The Position

Outschool is seeking a Public Funding Project Lead to drive the company's position as a leading Education Savings Account (ESA) platform. This role is crucial for scaling and optimizing existing operations, ensuring smooth launches, onboarding new programs, and expanding reimbursement processes. The Project Lead will act as the central point of contact, coordinating efforts across Customer Experience, Marketing, Legal, Finance, and Product teams. A key aspect of this role involves becoming an internal expert on the ESA family, ensuring all initiatives reflect the needs and navigation styles of these families. Additionally, the role will spearhead the integration of AI to enhance efficiency and automate manual processes, transforming them into scalable solutions. The Public Funding Project Lead will maintain alignment across a distributed operating model, proactively identify and mitigate risks, leverage deep ESA expertise to inform strategy, and elevate execution standards.

Requirements

• Proven project or program management experience leading cross-functional initiatives to on-time, on-budget delivery.
• A track record of acting as a trusted partner across functions — not just tracking a plan, but building enough credibility with each team that they bring you problems early.
• Comfortable working through disagreement: can surface competing priorities between teams, facilitate toward a decision, and communicate tradeoffs and risks to stakeholders clearly, even without formal authority.
• Strong operational and process orientation, with the ability to turn ambiguous, fast-changing requirements into clear, repeatable workflows.
• A track record of not just running operations but improving them — finding efficiencies and building processes that scale with growth.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools to speed up delivery and improve efficiency.
• Deep understanding of — or the ability to quickly ramp on — the ESA, public-funding, and homeschooling landscape and the families it serves.

Nice To Haves

• Lived experience with ESAs, homeschooling, or education-choice programs
• Previous EdTech or online-marketplace experience
• Previous experience in startups, especially in the hypergrowth phase

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-functional execution of public-funding and ESA initiatives across CX, Marketing, Legal, Finance, and Product — translating strategy into coordinated project plans, clear owners, and on-time delivery.
• Build trusted working relationships with the owners in each function — CX, Marketing, Legal, Finance, and Product — well enough to understand their real constraints and broker tradeoffs.
• Act as Outschool’s internal ESA-family expert, bringing the lived persona into product, go-to-market, and support decisions, and pressure-testing our messaging and experience before it reaches families.
• Own the project-management systems and operating cadence for the public-funding program — roadmaps, dependencies, status tracking, and clear decision-making across teams.
• Drive and coordinate AI-enabled efficiency — identify and (with engineering as needed) build automations such as order-fulfillment and invoicing workflows that reduce manual effort and help the program scale.
• Continuously look for ways to improve and scale ESA operations — spotting inefficiencies and bottlenecks, streamlining and automating workflows, and building processes that hold up as volume grows.
• Keep our distributed operating model coordinated: ensure the teams that own individual pieces of public funding stay aligned, and proactively surface and resolve risks.
• Partner with the Partnerships Lead to coordinate the internal execution of partner-driven launches, keeping Product, CX, Legal, and Finance aligned as new partners and programs come online.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed