Cohort Director

Austin, TX | Full-Time | July 2026 Start

Leap Year 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  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.

• 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.

• 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…