We’re growing our team. The Roots of Progress Institute is hiring for two additional roles:
Both roles are full-time, fully remote, and based in the United States.
We also have three other roles still open:
Please apply if interested, or share these opportunities with great candidates! The links above are shareable. The full text of the new Event Manager and Education Program Operations Manager roles are also shared below.
Event Manager
The role
The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking an Event Manager, to bring together people and foster community in and around the growing progress movement.
RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has been profiled by BBC and Vox. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is quoted as a spokesman for progress in those stories, and we are known as a central organization in that movement.
Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for the community, with headliners including founders of billion-dollar companies (Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Dimitri Dolgov), Nobel laureates in physics and economics (John Martinis, Michael Kremer), and heads of government agencies like DARPA (Steven Winchell) and OSTP (Michael Kratsios). The conference is sold out every year with hundreds on the waitlist, and participants rave about it each year: “like reading Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks”, “the best event I’ve ever attended”, “will be paying dividends for many years”, “the quality of people and conversations was pure gold”.
With this strong track record, we want to do even more events and community building. The biggest next step is Progress Conference Europe, planned for Amsterdam in late spring 2027. This is our first event outside the US, and the flagship project for this role. Alongside it, we are planning more specialized events, such as workshops with professors, journalists, or storytellers. We’re also eager to pilot one-day regional events in the US and to expand our online community efforts.
As the Event Manager, you will of course be in charge of all the operational details of the events you run. But what sets this opportunity apart for the right candidate is your ability to fully own both strategy and execution. We operate like a startup, with high autonomy. The right candidate will be able to shape the programming of our events—from choosing topics for conference track talks, to designing working sessions, to communicating with speakers and partners in the service of events. And the bar is high: If successful, these events are where new ideas and projects get incubated and where long-term relationships form between people who might just change the world.
What you will own and do
You will be responsible for:
Progress Conference Europe, planned for Amsterdam in late spring/early summer 2027
Additional events TBD—such as another regional conference, or more focused workshops for university professors or other participants
Supporting events in service of other programs, such as the Progress in Medicine summer career exploration program for high school students, or the book launch for Jason’s forthcoming book with MIT Press, The Progress Manifesto
How we’ll measure success:
Reach: Attendance across the events you run
Financial sustainability. Our events are expected to be largely self-funding. You’ll own the budget for your events, and work with our Development Manager (once hired) on sponsorship and with the team on ticket revenue, so that the events program sustains itself over time rather than drawing on funding meant for other work.
Quality: We’re proud of our attendee satisfaction, with NPS typically 70+, and you’ll own that for your events.
We also track outcomes particular to each event—new courses launched after a workshop for university professors, for instance. Getting better at measuring what events actually produce (projects started, collaborations formed, careers changed) is something we want to improve on, and we’d want your thinking on it.
You will own the events you’re responsible for from start to finish, working with RPI’s leadership on programming decisions—speaker selection, track design, and the shape of the experience.
Day-to-day tasks might include:
Venue & vendor management—assessing locations and production partners, negotiating contracts, managing venue execution
Collaboration with the Development Manager to raise sponsorship funding & communicate event results to sponsors
Collaboration with event partners and co-hosts
Speaker management—securing speakers, coordinating their talks and logistics
Program design and execution—event flow, non-speaker programming (e.g., book signing, evening entertainment, VIP reception, factory or lab tours)
Guest management—invite list management, ticket sales, application review for open applications, attendee communications
Event marketing and communications—website, outreach posts, post-event video production—in coordination with the Head of Content (once hired)
Event operations—scheduling, badges, swag, catering, AV, check-in management and all the many details that make an event great
Manage the event budget and ensure financial goals are met
And much more that you will figure out!
You will report to Heike Larson, our Vice President of Programs. You’ll work closely with Ben Thomas, our first event manager, who will bring you up to speed; you’ll support each other during high workload phases around each event.
About you
Among other qualifications, you should:
Be excited by the ideas of the progress movement—whether you’ve been part of this community for years or are discovering it through this post
Be excellent at operations, including project management, and proactive at using tech (software, and AI tools) to drive operational effectiveness and efficiency
Be crisp and articulate in communications. You must be able to communicate with partners, sponsors, and event participants in an effective, no-nonsense way.
Be a people person who enjoys connecting and bringing people together around shared interests and purpose
Have experience with events—any kind of in-person gathering where great experiences matter and many details need to line up perfectly
Beyond that, we’re open to a range of experience:
A more senior candidate will have led large, complex events end to end, and will be deeply familiar with the progress movement—its ideas, its themes, and the people driving it. If this is you, then you’d take on programming decisions, speaker slates, and sponsor relationships early.
A more junior candidate might be earlier in your career but strong on the fundamentals above. In this case, we’d support you more heavily on programming and speaker selection while you build that judgment, and we’d want to see the trajectory that gets you there within a couple of years.
Formal event-management experience isn’t required for this path. You might come from a people team at a startup where you ran off-sites, a chief-of-staff or operations role at a consulting firm or VC fund, or a nonprofit that runs workshops.
Location and travel
We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere in the contiguous United States. You must be authorized to work in the US; we aren’t able to sponsor visas or employ outside the country.
This role travels: roughly 25+ days a year across 8-10 trips. Most are short (2–3 days) for site visits, planning, RPI team meetings, and smaller events; three or four are longer (5–7 days) to run or support major events.
You’ll need a valid passport: Progress Conference Europe will be organized from the US, with several planning trips to the Netherlands and a longer stay for the event itself. Travel will be heavier in your first year, as it will be the first time we host Progress Conference Europe.
Living reasonably close to a major hub airport makes this role considerably easier, though it isn’t a requirement.
Apply for the Event Manager position
Education Program Operations Manager
The role
The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking someone who loves working with teenagers to run our high school summer program Progress in Medicine. Over the next couple of years, you’ll grow this program to hundreds of students, and lay the foundation for scaling our education outreach to thousands of students.
RPI is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. We are part of the broader progress movement that was kicked off in The Atlantic and has since been profiled by BBC and Vox, with our founder Jason Crawford as a key voice. Speakers at our annual Progress Conference include founders of billion-dollar companies, Nobel laureates in physics and economics, and heads of agencies like DARPA and OSTP; our writers fellowship includes influential voices on topics from AI policy to YIMBY reform to longevity technology. We also run a fellowship for progress writers, now in its fourth year. We have been doing all of this with a full-time team of five, which tells you something about how we operate—and we’re hiring to do even more.
In summer 2026, we launched a new summer career exploration program for teenagers, Progress in Medicine, which features several weeks of virtual instruction capped by a five-day in-residency program at Stanford University. It is the pilot program for a systematic educational campaign that aims to reorient teenagers from doom and anxiety toward agency and inspiration to help build a better tomorrow. We believe that ideas shape the future, often by changing how young people see the world and what purpose they pursue with their lives.
The pilot was a great success. We enrolled 30 ambitious, talented teens, showed them how people like them tackled medical problems in the past and built the modern world. We exposed them to ambitious builders in medicine, bio, longevity, and policy. By the end of the programs, this initial group of teens reported being more optimistic about the future, and being inspired to pursue different, more ambitious career paths in medicine.
As Education Program Operations Manager, you’ll own operations for Progress in Medicine in 2027 and scale it from there: more cohorts, more topics, more universities, run well enough that parents trust us with their kids and students leave changed. You’ll work closely with our curriculum leaders to choose advisors, near-peer mentors, company tour locations, and other partners. You’ll work with Stanford, our current summer camp host, and help us build similar relationships with other top universities. That alone is a major, multi-year initiative.
Beyond that, we expect to create programs that will scale beyond the high-touch in-person experiences we lead, which can reach at most a few hundred students each year. This will be some combination of online programs, high school curricula, and career resources; our leadership team will research and decide the strategy in the coming year. If you join now, you’ll build the operational foundation and the reputation that will enable future growth. Depending on what you bring to the table, there’s a path here that grows into running a team and contributing to the future expansion.
This role reports to Heike Larson, our VP of Programs, and will work closely with the curriculum leader for the summer programs—Laura Mazer for Progress in Medicine.
What you will own and do
You will be responsible for all operations for our high school educational programming:
Marketing, recruiting, enrollment, ongoing communications
Virtual program operations
In-person on-campus programs
You’re the person who makes sure the program runs flawlessly and safely for our students, and that parents have confidence in entrusting their teenagers to us.
How we’ll measure success
Reach. How many teens go through our programs, and how much of the program they complete. Growing this—more students, additional cohorts, eventually new topic areas beyond medicine—is the point of the role.
Financial sustainability. Over time, we want our summer programs to pay for themselves: tuition plus sponsorships covering program costs, including staff time and teaching (but not necessarily new program development). You’ll manage the program budget and work with the team on enrollment and sponsor support so the program sustains itself operationally as we scale.
Quality. We’re proud of our participant satisfaction, with NPS typically 70+ across RPI programs, and you’ll own that for your programs.
We also care about what the program does for students themselves: we survey them before and after on what they learned and whether their view of the future shifted in a more solutionist direction. Measuring that well is hard, and getting better at it is something we want your help with.
Day-to-day activities
Plan and set up key program elements, from advisors and mentors, to university relations and lab/company tours
Plan and execute program marketing, from website to socials and paid placement, to video production
Organize and run the application and enrollment process, including student interviews and parent and student enrollment forms
Run the virtual program, from setting up the program platform to handling the production of program binders
Plan and execute the in-person residency—everything from managing dorm room assignments to transportation between locations to organizing the final celebratory event
Own program communications—with students, parents, and partners (university, advisors, near-peer mentors, company partners)
Own the program budget and drive continuous improvement, including automating operations so the program can scale
About you
You should:
Be excited to work with young people (high school through early college). You enjoy this age group and relate well to them. Ideally, you have some experience as a tutor, coach, camp counselor, or other role where you have supervised and supported young people.
Believe that education shapes what a young person does with their life, and, deep down, that empowering young people to choose purposeful careers as builders is important.
Be excellent at operations, including project management, and a power user of software and AI tools—someone who reaches for them to make operations faster and better.
Be crisp and articulate in communications. You’ll be communicating with students, parents, advisors, and university partners, and you need to be clear and no-nonsense with all of them.
Be excited by the ideas of the progress movement—whether you’ve been part of this community for years or are discovering it through this job post.
Beyond that, we’re open to a range of experience:
A more senior candidate will bring both deep experience working with high-school-aged students and a demonstrated ability to manage and scale operations in a physical, in-person setting (private schools, hospitality, summer camps or similar). If this is you, you will be able to fully own scaling Progress in Medicine from one cohort to two (or more), as well as designing the non-curricular elements of another Progress in ____ program (engineering, or economics/entrepreneurship, for example), including finding advisors, near-peer mentors, and tour partners. You’ll also take on university relationships from the start, first with our current partner, Stanford University, and down the road with other universities.
A more junior candidate might be earlier in your career but strong on the fundamentals above. In this case, you’d own the 2027 program end to end—marketing, applications, enrollment, and the in-person residency itself—while we handle advisor, mentor, and university partner relationships until you’ve built that judgment. We’d want to see the trajectory that helps you grow into the full role within a couple of years.
Great candidates can come from a variety of backgrounds. You might have worked with young people during college summer jobs, or as a tutor, sports coach, or teacher. Separately, you might have owned operational responsibility at a small business, start-up, retail store, or hotel, or you might have been run operations at a school or summer camp.
What we’re hiring for is the operations job: our curriculum leads own what gets taught, and you own everything that makes it happen.
Location and travel
We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere in the contiguous United States. You must be authorized to work in the US; we aren’t able to sponsor visas or employ outside the country.
This role requires significant travel during the summer. The in-residency portion of our programs runs on campus (at Stanford in 2027, and likely at additional universities as we grow), and you’ll be on site for the duration. The 2027 residency is roughly a week; as we add cohorts, expect this to grow toward a month of continuous on-site work each summer. During residency, days are long and include evenings and weekends: you’re the person making sure the program runs well and our students are safe and cared for.
The rest of the year is lighter — roughly 10–15 days across a handful of short (2–3 day) trips for campus and partner site visits, RPI team meetings, and program-related events. You’ll also be able to attend our annual Progress Conference in the fall, where a handful of our summer students join us as guests.
Living near the campuses where we run programs makes the summer stretch easier—you can sleep in your own bed some nights—but it isn’t a requirement, and the locations will change as we expand. Being close to a major hub airport also helps.
One thing we want to be upfront about: over time, a month away from home in the summer is a real ask. It’s demanding, and people come back from it tired. That’s why we expect you to take extended paid time off after the residency to recharge—not just a week, but a meaningful vacation plus time off at home.
Apply for the Education Program Operations Manager position
Compensation and benefits for all roles
Mission-driven work shouldn’t mean sacrificing your livelihood. We benchmark pay against comparable roles at both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and set salaries using a structured leveling rubric rather than by negotiation. We won’t match Silicon Valley salaries, and we don’t have equity, but we don’t expect anyone to take a hardship discount for caring about the mission.
Health insurance. A monthly allowance through Thatch, a new type of health insurance broker under ICHRA, that you use to buy your own plan. RPI currently covers roughly the cost of a typical silver-level plan, 100% for you and 75% for dependents. Because you choose from many plans available in your state from multiple insurance carriers, rather than the one or two a small employer could negotiate, most people land on better coverage, a better price, or both.
Retirement. A 401(k) plan; RPI doesn’t currently match contributions.
Time off. We work to outcomes, not hours. Rather than counting days, we expect people to take roughly 20–25 days off a year, plus holidays, and we’re largely closed between Christmas and New Year’s. After an intense stretch, when taking time off often isn’t possible—like running a conference or closing out a program—extra recovery time afterward is normal and encouraged. Sick leave is separate.
Parental leave. After a year of employment: eight weeks at full salary for any new parent, by birth, adoption, or surrogacy, plus four additional weeks for birth mothers. Your role is held for you, and you can come back at half time for the first two weeks at full pay.
About the Roots of Progress Institute
The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. Our programs this year include:
Progress Conference, the main annual gathering for the progress community
The Blog-Building Intensive, a fellowship program for progress writers
Progress in Medicine, a summer program for high school students
Teaching Progress, a workshop for university professors who want to teach ideas of progress
Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, including in his forthcoming book The Progress Manifesto.
Why care about progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.
In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.
Read more about our mission and the bios of our team.
Application Process and Timeline
We believe a good application process allows us to get to know you, and you to get a feel for what it’s like working with us. We move quickly, and expect roughly these steps:
Written application. Give us some basic info about you and your current situation, and answer a handful of questions on why you’re excited about this role and qualified to do it well. You’ll also need to link to your resume and your relevant socials.
A 30–45-minute Zoom screen with hiring manager Heike Larson
An application task. You show you can do some of the work, and get a feel for the job. This will take several hours, depending on your background and speed.
Round 2 interviews. You’ll meet with two additional RPI staff members relevant to your role. They’ll review your task with you and go deeper on your experience.
Final conversations with Jason Crawford, our founder and president, and a follow-up with Heike to address any open questions on either side.
We’ll ask finalists for two references we can call before making an offer.
Both roles are near-term hires. Apply as soon as you can. We’d like to invite finalist candidates to join us for Progress Conference 2026 in Berkeley, CA on October 8-11. Start dates for both roles are asap; we’d like to have them on the team by December or January.
Contact me soon