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Why You'll Love This Role: 

We are seeking a Manager, Assessment Content to own assessment content strategy, quality, and execution across all subject domains. Reporting to the Director, Assessment and Analytics (A&A) Portfolio, you'll lead a team of Assessment Content Designers and Content Contributors. You'll also be the team's chief operator - building the repeatable processes, tooling expectations, and cross-team consistency that allow assessment content to scale. This is a leadership role: you will not be writing items day to day, but your judgment will shape every item that ships and will set the bar for quality and experimentation.

What You'll Be Doing:

Strategy and roadmap

• Content strategy. Own the assessment content strategy and roadmap in partnership with the Director, Assessment and Analytics Portfolio and the A&A Product Manager.
• Roadmap execution. Drive execution of the assessment content roadmap; translate quarterly production plans into team assignments, milestones, and vendor scopes.
• Content coverage. Ensure content gaps are identified and closed across all subject areas, including academic content areas (ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies) and non-academic content areas (Social Skills, School Climate); prioritize across domains based on roadmap and customer needs.
• Standards stewardship. Monitor state and national standard changes across all content domains; ensure Content Leads are maintaining current mappings and escalate cross-domain risks proactively.

Team leadership

• Lead the assessment content team. Manage Assessment Content Designers and Content Contributors - set direction, coach for growth, run regular 1:1s and performance reviews, and develop the bench.
• Production management. Scope, plan, and manage large-scale projects with Content Designers, freelance contributors, and third-party vendors to meet aggressive production targets.
• Quality framework. Own the contributor and vendor quality framework across all content domains; conduct calibration sessions and performance reviews directly where no Content Lead is in place.

Operational excellence

• Process and tooling. Drive operational excellence by creating clear, repeatable processes and championing the tooling needs of the team.
• Consistency across teams. Unify content processes and ensure consistency with other Newsela assessment designers and teams (e.g., editorial style, metadata tagging, accessibility standards).

Cross-functional partnership

• AI for content generation. Collaborate with Product and Engineering to train AI models for content generation and to evaluate AI-assisted authoring tools and outputs.
• Cross-functional collaboration. Partner with Product, Engineering, Marketing and Customer-facing teams as needed on content tooling, customer questions, and go-to-market readiness.
• Other duties as assigned.

About You:

• 8+ years of experience in assessment content development at commercial scale (EdTech company, testing vendor, or educational publisher), with at least 2+ years in a people-management role.
• Demonstrated success leading teams that include senior individual contributors - coaching, calibrating, and developing item writers and content leads.
• Multi-subject standards fluency: command of CCSS, NGSS, and state-specific frameworks across multiple K-12 content areas, with the ability to set quality and alignment expectations even outside your strongest subject.
• Expert understanding of educational assessment design across formative, common, and summative contexts, including measurement principles and Depth of Knowledge (DOK).
• Track record managing freelance contributors and third-party vendors at scale, including building and running a quality framework with calibration and performance review.
• Strong project and production management skills - scoping work, building milestones, surfacing risk, and delivering against aggressive timelines.
• Demonstrated experience designing repeatable processes and championing tooling that helps a content team scale.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills - comfortable collaborating with Product, Engineering, and customer-facing teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate between content, product, and engineering audiences.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience collaborating with Product and Engineering on AI/ML-assisted content generation - including evaluating model outputs, defining guardrails, and informing training data needs.
• Familiarity with content authoring tools or interoperability standards such as QTI
• Classroom teaching experience in one or more K-12 content areas.
• Exposure to item performance and psychometric data, and the ability to translate that data into content revision priorities.
• Experience leading content operations through significant scale or workflow change (e.g., new platform, new authoring model, new vendor strategy).
• Experience working with Pendo, Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence), Tableau, and Heap

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Why you'll love working at Newsela:

• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical benefits with employer contribution to premiums and to HSA accounts. Additional benefits such as gym reimbursement, pet insurance, free access to the Calm app, Rocket Lawyer and more to help you stay healthy: mind, body, and soul. 
• Work From Home: We are a fully remote company. We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
• Supporting ALL Families: Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more! 
• Financial Wellbeing: Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO, paid sick time off, company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
• Professional Development: Newsela offers an annual learning and development allowance to employees to attend external training sessions, classes, workshops, conferences, and educational materials to foster professional growth within their current role and career aspirations at Newsela.
• Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K-12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela's solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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