Cohort Director

Austin, TX | Full-Time | July 2026 Start

The Role

LeapYear is a nine-month Christian leadership accelerator in Austin for high school graduates. High-achieving eighteen to twenty year olds decide to spend a year with us instead of, or before, college to clarify who they want to become and how to get there through three core elements: Career Design, Leadership Development, and Spiritual Formation. They leave the program clearer about who they are, grounded in Christ, and equipped to lead.

We're hiring a Founding Cohort Director to own the student experience for up to twenty-four students across one full program year. This is the first hire of its kind at LeapYear. Our CEO has been wearing the CEO & Cohort Director hats at the same time as we’ve been building the program. The CD role clearly needs a full-time leader who can dedicate all their attention to the growth of students and guide students through the program.

Our core program philosophy is formation over information. Curriculum that transfers knowledge without forming the student misses the point. Our entire program is built around experiential learning and our goal with everything we teach is that students put it into practice. The Cohort Director role is a formation role first and a facilitation role second. You are here to help shape who these students become, not to deliver content at them.

This is an evolving role at an early-stage startup. You're not executing a perfectly refined playbook. Instead, you’re helping us build the playbook that we’ll use to launch in new cities.

What You'll Own

• The student experience, end-to-end: You are the constant in the program. The person students see most, and the one who knows their names, their stories, their stuck points, and their wins. You set the tone, hold the line, and build the culture that makes this year the most formative of their lives.
• 1:1 mentoring and care: You’ll be available to every student you lead to help them think through career decisions, relational struggles, spiritual growth, financial stewardship, and the messy real-world problems that show up during a gap year. Your goal is not to give them answers, but to help them build the capacity to find their own by asking great questions at the right time. This is where the role of coaching and the Cohort Director overlap. The distinction between the two is that the cohort director will do more mentoring, communicate with parents, and be in person. Coaches can then focus on discovery and deepening student understanding and action.
• Group facilitation across many formats: Weekly cohort debriefs, workshops, challenges, book discussions, site visits, retreats, morning sessions, dinner experiences, and spiritual formation intensives. This is completely unique to your role. While we have coaches who meet with every student, you will lead the group as a cohort and steward the culture that grows within it. When it comes to delivering curriculum, you will maintain structure where it's needed and be creative when the moment calls for something different.
• Accountability: Students will inevitably cut corners, miss commitments, and let standards slip. You address it directly, in the moment, to build trust and the relationship.
• Parent partnership: We see parents as the primary figures in most students' formation journey. And because of the nature of this gap year, we have varying degrees of parent involvement. Students will sometimes live at home and learn to transition from high school to adulthood. Other students will move into co-living situations or on their own for the first time. And all of that comes with a host of questions and new relational norms for parents and their students. As a program, we're dedicated to partnering with parents in the formation of their students. In order to serve them and build that partnership, you’ll build proactive communication rhythms, be open to any needed conversation, and be the primary contact for parents.

What Else this Role Involves

1. Building the Playbook: Think of yourself as a product manager for the student experience: close to the user, generating improvement ideas, translating what you see into a better version of the program.
2. Help recruit the next cohort: Our vision is to have a City Director (a role our CEO will continue to play this year) that owns partnerships, marketing, and overall recruitment. The Cohort Director will support recruiting efforts by interviewing prospective students and making the decision of who gets accepted into the next LeapYear Cohort. The Cohort Director, in some ways, is the experience of LeapYear for a student — because of that, students need to get to know and be interested in joining a cohort based on the Cohort Director they meet in the recruiting process.
3. Your Team: You’ll work alongside 1-2 LeapYear Fellows and a coach.

• The Fellows will handle logistics, communications, and event execution alongside you. They’ll help you do what you do best—facilitating and guiding students through a transformational year, by taking admin off your plate and playing a player-coach role on the team. These Fellows just graduated college or are emerging adults, and are excited to come alongside you for their own transformational year. You’ll develop them as leaders and manage them as their direct report.
• At LeapYear our Coach role is about building agency in students. As licensed professional coaches, they’ll meet with each student 1:1 every other week. While you are their mentor, the coach doesn’t operate as a mentor, counselor, or spiritual director. They will use professional coaching methodology to help each student develop self-awareness, agency, and the capacity to navigate the significant decisions ahead of them. Your relationship with the coach will be tight knit and you’ll work together as a team to identify where each student is in their journey and work to meet them where they are. Since your time will be filled with program delivery and facilitation, you’ll lean on the coach for student support. The two of you will have regular touch-points to share growth and needs you’re noticing for students.

Who You Are

The archetype is an experienced, highly-relational professional who is dedicated to developing young leaders and has experience in youth ministry settings. Someone who has done real work in the world outside of ministry and brings that credibility into student formation. We are looking for someone with:

• A living Christian faith, with theological range. This role leads spiritual formation as one of our three program pillars, including facilitating prayer, scripture engagement, book discussions across Christian traditions, and ongoing discipleship. A personal, practicing Christian faith is a bona fide requirement of the role. You're secure in your own tradition and genuinely curious about others. Our cohort has included students who are Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed, charismatic, and non-denominational, and you can facilitate across that range without flattening the differences.
• Tested Facilitation ability. You can hold a room of twenty-four students by creating structure when it's needed and letting a conversation go where it needs to go when there’s momentum. You have trained instincts here and have practice facilitating groups.
• A diagnostic eye for human patterns. You can sit with someone over weeks of conversation and start to name what they can't yet see about themselves: the patterns they repeat, the places they flinch, and the stories they tell to avoid the harder truth underneath. This is the core of the work, and it's the hardest thing to hire for.
• The coaching instinct. Your first move when a student is stuck is to ask a better question, not to offer a solution. You listen for what's underneath what someone is saying and are comfortable with silence.
• Real-world experience that earns credibility. You've built something from scratch, managed a budget or a P&L, led a team through ambiguity, built a network, and taken risks on unfamiliar opportunities. When a student is wrestling through professional decisions and applying their learning you can answer from your own experience rather than from theory.
• Kind accountability. You can hold an eighteen year old responsible for their commitment to a team, and do it in a way that makes them feel more seen, not less. You hold consequences in place because you believe in the student, not to enforce policy or prove a point. You don't rescue people from the weight of their own decisions, and you stay on their side while they carry it.
• Intellectual range. You’re curious and and avid reader. Theology, business, psychology, philosophy, leadership. You can take a complex idea and translate it into something a twenty year old can apply to their actual life this week. While you no doubt have areas of specialization or study, you’re great at synthesis and cross-discipline connections.

What We're Offering

• Full-time, salaried role. Base salary starts at $85K, commensurate with experience.
• Clear growth path. This role is the first Cohort Director seat at LeapYear. As we scale from one cohort to multiple, and from Austin to other cities, there is a potential growth path to City Director.
• Work that matters. We’re shifting the paradigm in America’s education. We’re excited about that work, and this is a chance to be a part of it.

Apply now using the 'Apply' button above.