Why You'll Love This Role: We are seeking a
Manager, Assessment Content to own assessment content strategy, quality, and execution across all subject domains. Reporting to the Director, Assessment and Analytics (A&A) Portfolio, you'll lead a team of Assessment Content Designers and Content Contributors. You'll also be the team's chief operator - building the repeatable processes, tooling expectations, and cross-team consistency that allow assessment content to scale. This is a leadership role: you will not be writing items day to day, but your judgment will shape every item that ships and will set the bar for quality and experimentation.
What You'll Be Doing:Strategy and roadmap
- Content strategy. Own the assessment content strategy and roadmap in partnership with the Director, Assessment and Analytics Portfolio and the A&A Product Manager.
- Roadmap execution. Drive execution of the assessment content roadmap; translate quarterly production plans into team assignments, milestones, and vendor scopes.
- Content coverage. Ensure content gaps are identified and closed across all subject areas, including academic content areas (ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies) and non-academic content areas (Social Skills, School Climate); prioritize across domains based on roadmap and customer needs.
- Standards stewardship. Monitor state and national standard changes across all content domains; ensure Content Leads are maintaining current mappings and escalate cross-domain risks proactively.
Team leadership
- Lead the assessment content team. Manage Assessment Content Designers and Content Contributors - set direction, coach for growth, run regular 1:1s and performance reviews, and develop the bench.
- Production management. Scope, plan, and manage large-scale projects with Content Designers, freelance contributors, and third-party vendors to meet aggressive production targets.
- Quality framework. Own the contributor and vendor quality framework across all content domains; conduct calibration sessions and performance reviews directly where no Content Lead is in place.
Operational excellence
- Process and tooling. Drive operational excellence by creating clear, repeatable processes and championing the tooling needs of the team.
- Consistency across teams. Unify content processes and ensure consistency with other Newsela assessment designers and teams (e.g., editorial style, metadata tagging, accessibility standards).
Cross-functional partnership
- AI for content generation. Collaborate with Product and Engineering to train AI models for content generation and to evaluate AI-assisted authoring tools and outputs.
- Cross-functional collaboration. Partner with Product, Engineering, Marketing and Customer-facing teams as needed on content tooling, customer questions, and go-to-market readiness.
- Other duties as assigned.
About You:- 8+ years of experience in assessment content development at commercial scale (EdTech company, testing vendor, or educational publisher), with at least 2+ years in a people-management role.
- Demonstrated success leading teams that include senior individual contributors - coaching, calibrating, and developing item writers and content leads.
- Multi-subject standards fluency: command of CCSS, NGSS, and state-specific frameworks across multiple K-12 content areas, with the ability to set quality and alignment expectations even outside your strongest subject.
- Expert understanding of educational assessment design across formative, common, and summative contexts, including measurement principles and Depth of Knowledge (DOK).
- Track record managing freelance contributors and third-party vendors at scale, including building and running a quality framework with calibration and performance review.
- Strong project and production management skills - scoping work, building milestones, surfacing risk, and delivering against aggressive timelines.
- Demonstrated experience designing repeatable processes and championing tooling that helps a content team scale.
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills - comfortable collaborating with Product, Engineering, and customer-facing teams.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate between content, product, and engineering audiences.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience collaborating with Product and Engineering on AI/ML-assisted content generation - including evaluating model outputs, defining guardrails, and informing training data needs.
- Familiarity with content authoring tools or interoperability standards such as QTI
- Classroom teaching experience in one or more K-12 content areas.
- Exposure to item performance and psychometric data, and the ability to translate that data into content revision priorities.
- Experience leading content operations through significant scale or workflow change (e.g., new platform, new authoring model, new vendor strategy).
- Experience working with Pendo, Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence), Tableau, and Heap
Final compensation will be determined based on the candidate's individual skills, qualifications, and experience. Total compensation for this role also includes incentive stock options and benefits.
Base Compensation Range
$95,000-$110,000 USD
