Director of Curriculum (Innovation)

• Personal experimentation and research.
• Supporting Makers as a business to stay ahead of the curve and using the company as an incubator.
• Listening very hard to our clients and understanding what they need and why.
  
  

• A Technologist at the Frontier: You have a strong technology background and want to work in an agile, responsive way—moving with the times to create learning experiences that reflect the frontier of tech. You find the vertiginous nature of AI and the extreme pace of change thrilling rather than challenging.
• An Exceptional Listener: You have exceptional listening and understanding skills. You can engage with our incredibly senior and engaged clients, get to the heart of what they need, and turn those conversations and explorations into learning materials.
• A Coach with Broad Range: You understand how people learn and feel confident shaping learning experiences. You can support our coaches and deliver great training yourself—both to junior, entry-level AI engineers and to middle-to-senior managers.
• Hands-on with the Details: You are supported by writers and coaches, but you get hands-on with the content and think hard about the details rather than delegating the high-impact choices. Just as importantly, you are never afraid to abandon brilliant work when it is out of date.
  
  

Key Responsibilities

• Keep close to the technologies, engineering practices and changing skills needs shaping the organisations Makers serves.
• Run focused experiments with areas such as generative AI agents, modern engineering stacks and cloud-native workflows.
• Turn what you learn into practical ideas for the curriculum, helping Makers decide where to move early, where to keep exploring and where to wait.

• Join executive and technical client conversations to understand the business context, technology stack, skills gap and what the client needs to achieve.
• Ask the questions that surface the real problem, challenge assumptions constructively and distinguish a learning need from a wider organisational issue.
• Turn those conversations into a clear curriculum brief covering the audience, outcomes, technical scope, delivery approach, constraints and measures of success, while being honest about what learning can achieve.

• Create clear curriculum plans and tailored proposals that respond directly to the client brief.
• Define the learning outcomes, content, sequence, practical activities, assessment approach and delivery model needed for the first cohort.
• Make sensible choices about pace, depth and technical ambition based on the learners, the client environment and the time available.
• Work with Commercial colleagues so proposals are technically credible, grounded in good learning design and clear enough for clients to make confident decisions.

• Lead or directly support delivery of the first cohort so that the original client need is not lost between design and the learner experience.
• Give the people involved in the pilot the context, materials and technical guidance they need to deliver well.
• Stay close to learners, coaches and client sponsors throughout the pilot, using their feedback and the results you see to identify issues early.
• Make sensible changes during delivery where they protect outcomes or client trust, remaining accountable for quality and satisfaction through the first cohort.

• Review the pilot with the client, delivery colleagues and Head of Curriculum Product.
• Bring together learner outcomes, feedback and lessons from delivery into clear conclusions and recommended changes.
• Be explicit about what has been validated, what still needs testing and what should not be scaled.
• Hand over the successful curriculum, supporting evidence and the thinking behind it, so Curriculum Product can take ownership of compliance, release readiness and ongoing improvement.

What We’re Looking For

• You bring experience operating at a senior leadership level, setting the direction for a product, innovation area or technical capability and influencing wider business priorities. (Essential)
• Experience leading complex conversations with senior enterprise clients, challenging the original brief and influencing the final solution. (Essential)
• Deep and current technical credibility in AI and emerging technology, alongside the ability to translate complex technical ideas into effective learning products. (Essential)
• Significant industry experience as a senior software engineer, technical consultant, solutions architect or in a similarly credible hands-on technology role. (Essential)
• A track record of turning an unclear business or skills need into a clear technical solution, curriculum design or learning proposal.
• Hands-on experience leading, teaching, coaching or directly supporting a first delivery, pilot cohort or comparable live learning experience.
• Experience using learner, client and delivery feedback to improve a pilot and make a clear recommendation about what happens next.
• Experience as a technical educator or coach is highly desirable, but we are equally interested in senior practitioners who can show strong learning design and facilitation skills

Benefits

• We have a minimum holiday policy, rather than a maximum. We encourage our team to take at least 25 days a year (excluding UK Bank Holidays), including a Winter and Spring break when we shut down between late December and January, and mid year for a week. The whole company takes a break, so you’ll have peace of mind in knowing that nobody is working, not just you;
• We embrace holistic health at Makers, where mental health matters and is just as important as physical health, which is why we offer unlimited fully paid wellness leave from day 1;
• Private Medical Insurance (after passing probation);
• £500 Learning & Development allowance per annum and paid time off dedicated to your training & learning;
• Join daily meditation sessions run for the staff and students;
• Company pension contributions;
• Enhanced parental pay & leave - up to 20 weeks fully paid maternity leave, up to 8 weeks fully paid paternity & secondary caregiver leave, and up to 20 weeks fully paid adoption leave;
• Access to a Perks at Work account which provides access to a range of shopping and other leisure discounts.