Public Funding Project Lead

Outschool•Canada, KY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Outschool is seeking a Public Funding Project Lead to drive the execution of public-funding and Education Savings Account (ESA) initiatives. This role will serve as the connective tissue for the public funding program, ensuring smooth operations and continuous improvement as the program matures from building new systems to running and scaling them. The Project Lead will be responsible for cross-functional execution across Customer Experience, Marketing, Legal, Finance, and Product, translating strategy into coordinated, on-time delivery for launches, new-program onboarding, and reimbursement expansion. A key aspect of the role is to become the internal expert on the ESA family, ensuring all initiatives reflect the needs and navigation of these families. Additionally, the role will spearhead the use of AI to automate manual processes and improve efficiency. The Public Funding Project Lead will maintain alignment across a multi-team effort, proactively identify risks, contribute deep ESA expertise to 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.