Director of Learning Design

About Tergar Schools

Tergar Schools is a Buddhist-inspired K–12 education nonprofit building a new model of learning (MOL). We operate a pilot school in Kathmandu, Nepal, and are constructing a larger campus in the Yolmo Valley in the Himalayas.

Our model rests on a simple starting point: every child possesses basic goodness and its qualities of awareness, love, compassion, wisdom, and joy. It is our job as educators to help them recognize this and give them tools to sustain it. Our long-term aspiration is to help form people who are resilient, altruistic, and joyful.

We’re now building the next chapter of that work: a comprehensive, fully secular model designed to weave into any school’s existing life — not just our own campuses. Rather than build more schools ourselves, we intend to reach 100+ schools in 4+ countries within five years by helping other schools, secular or religious, adopt the model as their own.

Why This Role Exists

Our footprint is growing quickly. Two high-performing private schools will begin piloting our model of learning in 2027. A research lab opens in Nepal with a world-class science team. The interest is real and growing.

What we don’t have yet is a full-time position for building the model itself — the products, courses, training materials, and classroom materials that will constitute MOL — and for leading the team that builds it out.

Today that thinking lives mostly with our Executive Director and the instincts of our founding team.  This isn’t sustainable at scale.  We need someone who can be fully dedicated to this element of our project: an outside-the-box thinker with real contemplative experience, genuinely excited by the challenge of building an entire family of products from scratch rather than adapting an existing portfolio.

The Opportunity

This is a builder’s role. You will not inherit a finished product, a proven training program, or a team. You will build those things — starting hands-on, in the room, with our first two outside partner schools — and then lead the team that takes them to scale.

We have materials.  However, none of them is a comprehensive, fully secular contemplative model designed to weave into everything a school already does. That is what you would be building, and there is no template for it.

If you are energized by deciding who you need around you rather than inheriting an org chart, and comfortable being personally in the work now so that later you can hand it to people you have trained this is the position for you. .

What You’ll Own

Building the model

• Design the teacher training program at the center of the MOL — the core product.
• Build out the materials that make the training usable in a real school. Today we imagine adaptable toolkits fitted by hand to each school, a playbook for staff and administrators, and family-facing materials. That is a starting hypothesis, not a spec — the process of choosing what comes is yours to lead. 
• Run the model as a product, not a document. Form real hypotheses about what teachers and schools need, test them in live classrooms, and let what you learn change what gets built.
• Propose what gets built now and what waits — and defend those calls. We hold two commitments at once: build lean, and be the best in the world at this. We call it Minimum Viable Mastery. You are the person who makes that real week to week, not just in principle.

Nailing the first schools

• Be personally hands-on with our new partner schools in Nepal as they begin onboarding in 2027. You will do this work in tandem with the Executive Director (ED).
• Use what you learn there to define what a stable first phase actually looks like, and build the real template other schools will follow.

Building your team

• Decide what team you need, and in what order — a Nepal Country Director and Trainer, Country Coordinators, strategic consultants, instructional designers, a UX researcher, and others as the shape of the work becomes clear (a Head of Training in Nepal is currently being hired).
• The ED and the Director of Operations (DOO) authorize and execute the actual hiring. The judgment about who and when is yours.

Setting the standard, over time

• Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and the ED hold final say on model fidelity today. As you build a track record — likely marked by a completed first onboarding cycle with our two partner schools — that authority shifts substantively to you.
• Turn Rinpoche’s two to four multi-day sessions a year into material the team can use again: recorded, distilled, built into training, rather than a remarkable conversation nobody can revisit.

Working with the evidence

• Partner with the research lab opening in Nepal in late 2026 — led by Drs. Richard Davidson, Robert Roeser, and Robin Nusslock — translating what they learn into real product and training decisions.

What’s Yours, and What Isn’t

You own the model and the team you build around you. Three things sit outside that:

• Fundraising and donor relationships. A separate role entirely.
• In-country adaptation and community relationships. Local teams own this on the ground, but you liaise with them directly and are in very frequent communication.
• Hiring mechanics. You decide who you need and when; the DOO handles offers, contracts, and process.

One thing sits in between: production. Instructional designers, visual designers, and media support will eventually build finished materials from your direction. You will not be making them yourself for long — but their quality is still on you.

Who You Are

What we’re really looking for

• A builder grounded in pedagogy. Deep pedagogical expertise is essential — you understand how children and adults actually learn, and you've designed for it. What sets you apart is that you build and deliver: you've turned that expertise into programs, curricula, or training that real teachers use. A tech or startup background alongside that is a genuine asset.
• Fluency in a lean approach to product design. You can talk concretely about strategic experiments, problem/solution and product/market fit, and validated learning — and you have actually worked that way, not just read about it.
• Real, lived contemplative experience. A genuine taste of practice, not necessarily in Tergar’s own lineage, and not merely theoretical familiarity. This is the one non-negotiable that doesn’t bend for the right resume.
• Comfortable being hands-on first and stepping back later. Personally in the work with our first schools, then deliberately building the standards and training that let a team carry it without you in the room.
• Able to build lean and aim to be the best in the world at the same time, without treating those as a trade-off.

Experience

• You bring substantial experience in education — as a teacher, school leader, curriculum developer, or learning designer — and you've built something real from that experience and gotten it into people's hands without much money or staff.
• Some experience directing, mentoring, or building a team from scratch, since you will be doing exactly that here.
• Comfort working directly from a founder’s evolving vision rather than a finished brief — you will be co-writing the brief as you go, especially in the first months.

Personal qualities

• Discernment above all: knowing which calls are yours to make outright and which need to go to the Rinpoche or the ED. This carries more weight here than almost any other quality, because for a long stretch there is no layer of management between your judgment and the model’s integrity.
• Genuine curiosity about and respect for a tradition that may not be your own, without needing to adopt it as your own practice.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and a mandate that will keep changing shape under you as the first schools teach you things no one currently knows.

How We Work Together

• Intensive, hands-on time in Nepal during onboarding and the first deployment of the model. Expect three to five months during the first year.
• Frequent, close contact with the ED for the first six months, settling into a slower rhythm as trust builds.
• Two to four multi-day sessions a year with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, alongside the wider team.
• A small, distributed, high-autonomy culture across Vermont, Wisconsin, Ireland, Kathmandu, and Minnesota — deep, steady, skillful work over speed.

Compensation & Logistics

• Full-time
• Fully remote.
• Compensation: $75,000–$100,000, DOE
• Benefits: flexible schedule, unlimited PTO, and health care reimbursement up to $1,000 per month