Overview
Academic Program Manager Jobs in India at Contour Education
Title: Academic Program Manager
Company: Contour Education
Location: India
This is a remote position.
When an academic resource is about to slip, are you the person who catches it a week early, before it becomes a room of students sitting in a class with nothing ready to learn from?
On a typical day you might unstick a review sitting between a Head of Subject and a Resource Developer in the morning, map the sequence and deadlines for a newly opened subject stream after lunch, and flag to the Academic Operations Coordinator before end of day that a printing dependency will miss its date, with a fix already worked out.
About Contour
We started in 2020 with a handful of students and a belief that great education should not be out of reach. Today we operate across three brands with 8,000+ students and 425+ team members: roughly 100 in India and 325 onshore in Australia. The India team runs publishing, student experience, CRM and technology, operations, and people and culture.
Held well, this seat is invisible and everything downstream just works. Held badly, students feel it first, and the people we hire now shape how Contour grows.
About This Role
You own the plan behind Contour's academic content. Every resource moves through planning, creation, review, publishing, and printing, across subjects and teams, and you own how that whole pipeline is sequenced, tracked, and kept ahead of need. You build the system that gets content produced on time. You do not run the daily execution inside it.
You report to the COO. The academics lead directs the academic work itself: what gets developed, and to what standard. You work to that direction and turn it into a plan that holds. The academic teams build the resources; the planning, the sequencing, the cross-team coordination, and the visibility are yours. When a new resource stream opens, you are the person who stands up its coordination and planning layer from the start.
This is a planning and coordination role, not a hands-on delivery role, and today it has no direct reports. You get the pipeline moving by rallying the people who own each stage: Heads of Subject, Resource Developers, and Publishing. As the function grows, this seat is the natural home for line management of academic operations. Managing people is welcome here, not a requirement of the role.
Downstream sits the Academic Operations Coordinator, who runs the teaching week: uploads, scheduling, attendance, and print orders. You hand them finished, sequenced resources and the academic calendar to run against. If a resource is late, that is yours to solve. Once it is ready and in their hands, the weekly delivery is theirs.
The bar here is not organization. Plenty of people can build a tracker. The bar is realism. Your plans have to survive contact with a real week, because when they do not, the cost is not an abstract delay, it is a class that is not ready when students arrive. The strongest person in this seat has run real operations before, somewhere a mistake carried a live consequence, and has the judgement to spot a plan that looks fine on paper but will break in practice.
Contour is adding subjects, students, and teams faster than an informal process can hold, and the pipeline only stays reliable at this scale if one person owns the plan behind it. By the end of month three, booklets are content-developed and published six weeks ahead of when students need them, not pulled together in the days before. You have the whole academic pipeline visible on a single tracker, the master academic calendar (content drops, mock exams, milestones) is yours and trusted, and you have found real ways to make the workflow more efficient, whether through AI or closer work with the content team. The systems you build in those first months will still be running the academic pipeline long after.
Where the work lives
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Google Sheets: the plan lives here, so building clean trackers and views other teams can read without asking you is the core of the craft, not a side skill.
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A project management tool (Monday.com, ClickUp, or Asana): keeping the plan and status current here is how Heads of Subject and Publishing see progress without a status meeting.
What You Will Do
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Own the content-production plan end to end. Sequence every academic resource through planning, creation, review, publishing, and printing across subjects and teams, and keep the whole thing moving ahead of need.
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Own the master academic calendar. Content drops, mock exams, assessments, and milestones. This is the plan everyone downstream works against.
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Stand up new resource streams. When a new subject or stream opens, build its coordination and planning layer from scratch: the sequence, the owners, the deadlines, the tracker.
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Rally the teams that do the work. Coordinate Heads of Subject, Resource Developers, and Publishing to hit the plan, and unblock reviews, dependencies, and handoffs before they stall.
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Mitigate bottlenecks a week early. Spot review delays, missing dependencies, or unrealistic deadlines ahead of time rather than on the day they hit.
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Build the system, not just the schedule. Design trackers and status views that give clear visibility without a status meeting, and keep improving pipeline efficiency, using AI or closer cross-team collaboration, to deliver resources ahead of schedule.
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Hand off clean. Pass finished, sequenced resources and the calendar to the Academic Operations Coordinator so the teaching week runs without surprises.
If a better tool or approach would make the pipeline run cleaner, make the case and we will back it.
Requirements
What You Need
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Experience owning a plan or a system before, in operations, program or project coordination, or a high-stakes execution role where operational errors carried immediate consequences.
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Strong analytical judgement: you can tell a plan that looks sound on paper from one that survives a real week.
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Advanced Google Sheets, and the ability to build readable, scalable trackers other teams rely on rather than basic data entry.
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Hands-on experience with project management software (Monday.com, ClickUp, or Asana) to drive team accountability and status clarity.
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The coordination instinct to rally people you do not manage: you get a plan hit through clarity and follow-up, not authority.
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Exceptional attention to detail across complex, overlapping timelines and dependencies, and sharp, concise communication that flags risk early.
Nice to Have
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Experience in academic operations, publishing workflows, or content pipelines.
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Background in a live operational setting where mistakes were felt immediately: student-facing, retail, events, or logistics.
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Familiarity with SLA or status tracking and workflow reporting.
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Experience coordinating across remote, distributed teams.
The Kind of People Who Thrive Here
The people who do well here see a workflow about to create a problem and close the gap before anyone asks. They rally a room they do not manage, follow up without being chased, and flag risk early instead of explaining it after. They think in systems: they would rather fix the process that keeps breaking than firefight the same task twice. This is a seat that grows. As academic operations scales, the strongest person here is the natural next owner of the function and the team inside it. The path from operator to leader is real here.
What good looks like
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The plan holds: The sequence survives a real week, and when it slips, you see it coming and adapt accordingly.
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Nothing slips silently: If a resource is at risk, the team knows at least a week in advance because you flagged it.
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Status is visible: Anyone can open the tracker and know where every resource stands – no meetings or follow-ups required.
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Students are never impacted: Every class has content that is developed, reviewed, and published ahead of need.
Benefits
The practical close
Fully remote, anywhere in India. Standard hours are 9 to 5 IST. Compensation is competitive and bench marked to the role and your experience, and we discuss it openly early in the process.
Apply with your CV and one short paragraph on a time you caught a plan that looked fine on paper but would have broken in practice, and what you did about it.
