Program Director

About Trala

Trala is a tech-powered online music school. We are the fastest growing music school in the world, with over 1000% growth in 2022. Our mission is to make world-class music education accessible to every single person on Earth.

Right now, music education is only accessible to the privileged, rich, and urban. Imagine instead a world where all 4 billion people who will pick up an instrument in the next 30 years could get a world-class education. That is the future we’re obsessed with creating.

At Trala, we’re pushing forward music education in three huge ways:

1. We invented signal processing technology that listens to students play their real instruments and gives instant feedback on every mistake.
2. We wrote the first major method of music instruction since 1954. It’s the first method geared towards adult learners and the first to prioritize accessibility and diversity.
3. We personally match every student with a teacher to make sure there’s a great fit.

Over the last 6 years, we’ve gotten 600,000+ downloads of our companion app, taught lessons to students in 183 countries, and earned support from great musicians like Joshua Bell. Our students are ages 5 to 90 and live in rural Montana, Lebanon, tiny Pacific islands, Hong Kong, and our hometown of Chicago.

In the next 18 months, we will:

• Grow from teaching 1500 lessons/month to 10,000 lessons/month.
• Hire and train 100+ new teachers.
• Incorporate bleeding-edge technology like GPT into our teaching operations.

Requirements

About the role

The mission of this job is to manage the teaching side of the world’s fastest growing music school. This is a new role at Trala. It’s a highly autonomous management role that entails scaling us from 30 to 200+ teachers and 500 to 3000 students. The Program Director will report directly to the CEO. In this role, you will:

• Set the vision for what great education looks and feels like for Trala students.
• Define and achieve learning outcomes for our students.
• Own the overall teaching experience. Define the plan for teacher onboarding and ongoing training.
• Hire and manage Program Managers, who in turn manage teachers on the day-to-day.
• Manage and improve the entire lifecycle of a student from the moment they buy a subscription to when they shout us out at the Grammys.
• Work with the Product and Engineering teams to build tools for teachers and students that increase retention and satisfaction.
• Build and continuously improve innovative curriculum that integrates technology and can be used consistently across all Program Managers and teachers.
• Work with the Sales and Marketing teams to continuously summarize student and teacher feedback, improve strategy, and refine our student acquisition operations.
• Build, invest in, and retain a diverse, equitable and inclusive team and culture that fosters a sense of belonging.

Success in this role is measured by the retention and satisfaction of students and teachers.

Requirements:

• Experience scaling the supply-side of a marketplace or music school.
• Experience teaching music lessons.
• Strong communication skills in a scaling organization.
• Proficient with technology. Ability and interest to utilize new technologies.
• Accountable and thorough, with high personal standards.
• Ambitious. Comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation.
• Bias towards action. Comfortable making impactful decisions and taking responsibility.
• Hands-on. Willing and eager to learn new skills to help out the team. You don’t view any task as “below” or “above” you.

Benefits

Why Trala?

• You’ll make an immediate impact on the team with a high degree of growth potential. If done correctly, this could be the defining role of your career.
• Trala is funded by amazing people like the CEOs of Reddit, LinkedIn, and Duolingo. They’re betting on Trala’s team — a team we hope you’ll join. In this executive role, you will likely be working with some of these people.
• Trala prioritizes diversity, inclusion, and righting economic and social wrongs in the music space. We strive to make our corner of the world a better place.
• Trala deeply impacts peoples’ lives all across the world. These are dreams we are fulfilling. Not “leveraged data monetization” or whatever value Facebook claims to provide these days.
• This is a full-time, remote role, though if you happen to be based in Chicago we’d love to invite you to do hybrid work in our West Loop office.

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