Instructional Design Manager

Job title - Instructional Design Manager

Employment type - Contract, with potential to convert to perm

Engagement model - Agency W-2

Work location - 100% remote

Travel - None expected

Bill rate range - To be confirmed

Expected hours - 40 hours per week

Contract duration - TBD

Extension likely - Month to month

Conversion to perm - Possible by mutual agreement, at $75,000 - $95,000

Openings - 1

Target start date - Before the end of October 2026

About Slater Certified®

Slater Certified® is an AI-powered workforce development platform for the water and wastewater sector. It delivers self-paced training that prepares professionals for licensure and continuing education, built around G.A.I.L. (Generative Artificial Intelligence Learning) - an interactive tutor that gives real-time feedback, personalized explanations and adaptive support, so someone studying on demand still gets guidance. The flagship course is a 40-hour Wastewater Class 3 Operator Training recognized by the Georgia Secretary of State, alongside a 24-hour continuing education course and an industrial wastewater program. Organizations can run a customized version, Powered by Slater Certified®, against their own workforce.

Slater Certified, LLC is the workforce development arm of Slater Infrastructure Group, LLC - an Alpharetta, Georgia infrastructure services firm founded in 1997, working across operations and maintenance, construction engineering and inspection, and environmental services for public and private clients. Slater Certified launched in July 2025 and is licensed in Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.

The team is small and moves fast. Technology choices are modern and made by the people who have to live with them, so the distance between an idea and a decision is short, and the distance between a decision and shipping it is shorter. Work is remote and the schedule is flexible. Ownership sits with the person doing the work, and there is real room to shape how things get built rather than inheriting someone else's process.

Position summary

Slater Certified® is an AI-powered workforce development platform for the water and wastewater sector. We have a live catalog of courses, a generative AI tutor sitting alongside them, and considerably more content to build than we currently have the capacity to build well.

We are hiring an Instructional Design Manager to own how our content gets made. This is a craft role first: taking raw material - a technical manual, a regulation, an hour with a subject matter expert - and turning it into a course that a working adult will actually finish. It is also a build-from-requirements role: given what a course needs to cover, you scope it, design it, and produce it.

It starts as a contract role and it starts hands-on, with no one reporting to you. As the content function grows, this is the role the other learning content creators report into. If it works on both sides there is a path to converting it to a full-time position.

What this role owns in the first six months

• Has designed and shipped at least one full course end to end - structure, content, assessments and supporting media.

• Has built content for more than one learning style on the same material, rather than producing one format and calling it a course.

• Has a documented, repeatable development process that someone else could follow, covering scoping, SME input, review and sign-off - the thing a growing content team will run on.

• Has taken at least one course from a written requirement to a finished product without needing the requirement rewritten first.

• Can point to a measurable improvement in learner completion or assessment performance on the courses worked on.

Key responsibilities

Instructional design and content development

• Design and build course modules, assessments and learning pathways.

• Build for different learning styles on the same material - reading, video, worked example, practice, scenario, assessment - so learners are not forced through one format.

• Apply adult-learning practice to an audience of working operators with limited study time.

• Produce and direct supporting media: video, diagrams, scenario-based exercises.

• Keep content SCORM and xAPI compliant and fit for delivery on our platform.

Building courses from requirements

• Take a requirement - from a customer, a regulator, or our own roadmap - and scope what the course has to cover.

• Run the discovery yourself: what the learner already knows, what the job actually demands, what the assessment has to prove.

• Turn raw source material into a teaching structure - a manual, a standard, a specification, or an hour with someone who has done the job for twenty years.

• Estimate and schedule content work honestly, and hold the dates.

Subject matter experts, quality and review

• Work directly with our wastewater SMEs to get the technical content right.

• Run the review process: SME validation, pilot testing, and a real feedback loop from learners.

• Hold version control and change history on every course.

• Keep content current as regulations, exam blueprints and industry practice change - our courses carry state approvals, and the documentation behind them has to hold up.

Working with the platform

• Work with product and engineering so content fits how the platform delivers and assesses it.

• Work with G.A.I.L., our generative AI tutor, so the content and the tutor reinforce each other rather than duplicating.

• Use learner analytics to find where people stall, and fix the content rather than explaining the number.

Working solo, and working remotely

• This is a fully virtual role. You will work alone most of the day, with no one sitting next to you and no one checking whether you started.

• Reach out first. Much of your input comes from software engineers, product and subject matter experts who are deep in their own work and will not volunteer it.

• Keep your own pipeline full - know what the next three pieces of work are, and go and get the direction you need rather than waiting to be handed it.

• Say when you are blocked, early and in writing, rather than absorbing it quietly.

Growing into the team lead

• Set the content standards and templates the next hires will work to.

• Review and raise the quality of other people's content as the team grows.

• Help hire the content creators who will eventually report into this role.

Must have

• 5+ years in instructional design, curriculum development or technical training development.

• Genuine instructional design craft - can take raw source material and build a course from it, not just produce content someone else has structured.

• Designs for multiple learning styles and modalities on the same material, and can explain why each choice was made.

• Has built courses from a written requirement, including doing the scoping rather than waiting for a specification.

• Fluent in adult-learning practice and competency-based design.

• Hands-on with an LMS or LXP, and with SCORM / xAPI.

• Can take a technical subject from a subject matter expert and turn it into something a non-academic adult learner will actually finish.

• Excels working solo. This is a fully virtual role and long stretches of it are unsupervised.

• Proactive about pulling work and direction - chases software engineers, product and SMEs for what is needed instead of waiting, and keeps their own queue full.

• Ready to grow into leading a small content team, and wants to.

Nice to have

Construction-sector experience is a significant advantage, and wastewater or industrial wastewater experience is a very significant one. Someone who has been on or around a plant already understands the work our learners do, and that shortens the ramp on every course we build.

• Experience designing for a regulated or certification-bearing field, or with state licensure and continuing education approval processes.

• Has built assessments validated against an external exam.

• Has managed or mentored other instructional designers or content creators.

• Has used generative AI as part of a content development workflow.

• Accessibility standards (WCAG, Section 508) applied in practice.

Rate, term and conversion

Bill rate range - To be confirmed

Engagement model - Agency W-2

Expected hours - 40 hours per week

Overtime - By prior written approval only

Contract duration - TBD

Extension - Month to month

Conversion to perm - Possible, by mutual agreement

Salary band on conversion - $75,000 - $95,000 (Band B3)

Expenses - Not reimbursable unless agreed in advance

Benefits - Not provided by Slater Certified during the contract term

Work environment - 100% remote

Slater Certified® is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.