Program Manager: Education

Are you an experienced program manager who is passionate about architecting and implementing technical education for world-changing technologies? Are you passionate about the blockchain space and building a better internet through community-driven innovation and governance? Are you great at cultivating relationships and aligning a wide range of teams behind a common goal? 

Are you specifically excited about designing and operating a dynamic technical training program to help onboard a wide spectrum of developers to NEAR’s core technologies?

As NEAR’s Education Program Manager, you will work closely with community developers, new hires, contractors and our internal education/training teams to establish and operate a series of training and certification programs designed to onboard participants to the NEAR platform and its core technologies.  This starts with onboarding new hires, community contributors and consultancies through hands-on technical training but expands to include the whole spectrum of onboarding programs that help people find their way into the open arms of the NEAR ecosystem from any position.

In this role, you will be empowered to build out these programs by marshalling resources (internal, external and incentives for students) and you will be responsible for delivering effective, repeatable and outcome-oriented programs which help people onboard to NEAR.

To be successful, you’ll need to be very organized and tactical, employing strong strategic thinking and a good understanding of NEAR’s ecosystem. You should have demonstrated success in leading or building similar programs in the past but perhaps most importantly, you need to be familiar with the zeitgeist of the crypto space and how hands-on online education works. 

Logistics

This is a full-time, partially remote position with the NEAR Foundation located in Switzerland or Germany, where you should be able to commute to the office for a couple of days per week in Zug, Switzerland or Berlin, Germany. Candidates are eligible for relocation assistance but EU and Swiss citizens will be prioritized. Contractors from other countries may be possible but it’s not prioritized as highly as local participants.

Key Outcomes

• Architect and implement programs which onboard new developers to the technology of NEAR, from deep core tech to the app development layer.
• Set up certifications and badges which verify that participants have accomplished the goals of the programs
• Work with the community team to make sure that ecosystem participants are aware of and engaged by these programs. 
• Track progress and outcomes of these programs

Key Requirements

• Technical education experience necessary. Blockchain experience strongly preferred.
• 5+ years of work experience in program management, product management and/or founding companies. Preference will be given to leaders who have architected and run similar programs before.
• Demonstrated ability to think strategically and creatively while applying sound business judgment and quantitative analytics
• Excellent oral and written skills to communicate complex issues and influence others internally and externally.  Also that rare combination of ability to communicate across many stakeholders, think strategically about crafting the program but also shepherd processes to their completion.

About NEAR and the NEAR Collective

NEAR's mission is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. The NEAR platform provides a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands.

The NEAR platform, NEAR Protocol, and associated tooling are being built by the NEAR Collective, a collection of the best engineers in the world who work across teams, companies and countries similar to other large scale open source projects. Core contributors include a couple of 2-time ICPC world champions, 2 gold medalists, a Latin American champion and multiple other competitive programming finalists.

About the NEAR Foundation

The NEAR Foundation is a nonprofit, non-beneficiary foundation based in Switzerland which supports community-driven innovation and the Open Web with a specific focus on the NEAR platform. The Foundation distributes grant funding into the NEAR ecosystem, coordinates governance among participants, educates people about the protocol and ensures that relationships among the community members are as strong and sustainable as the apps they build. It seeks to combine the inclusive care of a community-driven NGO with the at-scale effectiveness of a Silicon Valley startup.