Principal Learning Designer, Life Skills

Level AI; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 100,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Level AI in Austin seeks a Learning Designer to own pedagogy for Life Skills curriculum, guiding what each skill is and how to teach it. You’ll collaborate across pods with designers, ensuring learning rigor across cognitive, emotional, social, and systemic life skills from concept to classroom pilot.

You’ll shape modules, balance editorial quality with speed, and push for scalable, evidence-driven improvements while staying at the frontier of learning science.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in instructional design, learning design, or curriculum development.
• Background in learning science, child development, or comparable grounding.
• Strong ability to learn new domains quickly and apply understanding.
• Strong product and creative sense with focus on coherence, polish, and user journey.
• Comfort making rough calls and exposing wrong calls early.
• Ability to provide editorial feedback with specificity and constructiveness.
• Strong cross-functional communication to translate learning goals into actionable briefs.
• Comfort using frontier AI models and awareness of AI limitations.

Responsibilities

• Deeply understand each skill in our curriculum and translate that understanding into clear direction for designers.
• Concept learning experiences with designers, shaping games and narratives that teach effectively.
• Break down a skill into components and techniques, using AI to generate first pass and refine with experts.
• Consult as concepts become concrete mechanics and scripts, ensuring pedagogical coherence.
• Serve as editorial reviewer across pods, enforcing a high standard of learning and providing actionable feedback.
• Build fluency in our curriculum framework and learn new domains to make informed judgment calls.
• Track learning goals across pods from concept to classroom pilot and identify gaps.
• Turn efficacy findings into concrete changes and work with research to validate modules.

Skills

Instructional design

Learning design

Curriculum development

Cross-functional communication

Project management

Editorial feedback

Education

Learning science background

Child development knowledge

Research literacy

K-12 knowledge

Job description

Level is a learning technology company dedicated to helping students build real academic and life skills with confidence and joy. We combine proven curriculum principles with world‑class interactive design to make meaningful practice something students want to come back to, not something they struggle through.

We support what teachers, schools, and parents are already doing by increasing student engagement with high‑quality, standards‑aligned practice that reinforces classroom learning. That’s why we’re building:

For students: Rewarding and motivating learning experiences that meet students where they are to build real academic proficiency.

For educators: Tools that fit naturally into instruction and help students stay engaged while reducing teacher workload.

For parents: Activities that help kids catch up or get ahead, build confidence, and minimize homework battles, whether learning at school or at home.

We are committed to helping every person maximize their potential and live a life of meaning. It’s a difficult problem that requires brilliant people and tremendous effort over time.

Level is looking for a Learning Designer to own the pedagogy behind our Life Skills curriculum: what each skill is, how it’s best taught, and whether our modules actually teach it. You’ll work across pods with our designers, bringing a deep understanding of each skill into the experiences they build and upholding learning rigor across cognitive, emotional, social, self and systemic life skills domains, from concept to classroom pilot. You’ll stay at the forefront of life skills learning science and operate at a high level across the pipeline – moving at speed and building toward scale.

This is a high‑responsibility, editorial role on a small, fast‑moving team: half shaping modules alongside our designers, half holding the bar as they are built. We’re building this from scratch, which means making calls before you’re certain, putting ideas out there early, and getting smarter together as we go.

What You Will Do:

• Deeply understand each skill in our curriculum — what it is, how it develops, and how it’s best taught at a given age — and translate that understanding into clear direction our designers can build from.

• Concept learning experiences with our designers, shaping games and narratives that teach effectively and that kids want to play.

• Break down a skill into its components and techniques, using AI to generate the first pass and refining it with subject‑matter experts and your own pedagogical judgment.

• Consult as concepts become concrete mechanics and scripts, in close and continuous iteration with designers. Integrate what they and subject‑matter experts each bring, and hold the judgment on pedagogical coherence when it conflicts with the experience.

• Serve as editorial review across pods, enforcing a high standard of learning. You own the quality bar — decide what advances and what goes back, and give feedback specific enough to act on while problems are still cheap to fix.

• Build fluency in our curriculum framework, and actively learn each new domain and its subcategories (e.g., systemic Life Skills include financial, media, and digital literacy), well enough to make judgment calls.

• Track learning goals across pods, from concept through classroom pilot — what each module targets, whether it’s landing, and where the curriculum has gaps.

• Own own turning efficacy findings into changes. Stay at the forefront of life skills learning science, work with our research team to ensure each module gets the validation it needs, and turn findings into concrete changes that can be carried to the rest of the team.

• Extend the craft and judgment built in curriculum work to new projects, formats, and experiments as they arise.

Qualifications

Need to Have:

• 5+ years of experience in instructional design, learning design, or curriculum development.

• A background in how people learn — learning science, child development, or comparable grounding — and an interest in keeping up with the research.

• A passion for learning new domains deeply and quickly, and applying that understanding.

• Strong product and creative sense — you can tell what’s working in an experience and articulate why, with real care for coherence, polish, and the end user’s journey.

• Comfort making calls without complete information — you’d rather get a rough version in front of someone this week than a polished one next month, and you surface your own wrong calls before anyone else finds them.

• Ability to uphold a quality bar and provide editorial feedback on other people’s work, with a sense of how to be specific while supportive.

• Strong project management skills with the ability to oversee multiple modules across pods simultaneously.

• Strong cross‑functional communication skills — you can translate a learning goal into a brief a designer can act on, and a design constraint into a pedagogical decision.

• Comfort using frontier AI models, and a sense of where AI is insufficient.

Nice to Have:

• Background in social emotional learning or life skills specifically.

• K‑12 classroom teaching experience.

• Experience in games, animation, or interactive media production.

• Experience in directly incorporating research findings into product or content decisions.

• A portfolio or work samples demonstrating instructional design, curriculum, or interactive learning content (if available, please include a link with your application).