Head of Curriculum for Online School

We're building a professional certification for dog trainers, and a consumer app that teaches dog owners the same method. Both need someone who owns the curriculum. Not someone who writes lessons. Someone who decides what every lesson teaches, in what order, and to what standard — and then holds two writers to it. About us K9 Genius Collective is a group of dog training and dog product brands. Our flagship is K9 Design — a certification program for professional dog trainers, launching December 2026 — alongside K9 Genius, a consumer app for dog owners. Behind both sits a single training methodology built from thousands of hours of the founder's teaching, plus a game-based, concept-first approach to building transferable skills in dogs. We have the raw material: 451 transcribed teaching sessions, roughly 1.2 million words, already clustered by theme, plus a draft certification outline. What we don't have is someone turning that mine into a real curriculum. What you'd own The curriculum architecture. Module maps, lesson sequences, learning outcomes. You decide what a trainer must be able to do by the end of each module, and what evidence proves it. Assessment design. Knowledge checks, practical assessments, the final certification assessment. This is a credential — it has to actually mean something. The standard. You write the style guide, the templates and the review rubric. Then you hold the line on them. Two content producers. They draft from your outlines using our AI content engine and our transcript library. You brief them, review every output, and approve it. Nothing reaches the founder as a draft. The handoff to production. We have a separate production department for filming, video and audio. You deliver approved scripts on a fixed schedule; they shoot them. You own the freeze dates. How we work We use AI heavily and unapologetically. Our producers draft with it against a structured engine and a curated source library. That means your time goes into structure, standards and judgment rather than typing — which is exactly where the value is, and why this role is 20–25 hours instead of 45. If you think AI has no place in instructional design, this isn't the role for you and we'd rather not waste your time. If you think AI is a drafting tool that makes a good instructional designer three times more productive, we agree. You're probably right for this if You've built a full course or certification end to end — not just modules, the whole architecture You can point at learning outcomes and assessments you designed and explain why they're structured that way You're a genuinely strong editor. You can take competent-but-flat writing and make it sound like a specific person. You're comfortable being the one who says "this isn't good enough yet" You've briefed and reviewed other writers Nice to have, not required You own a dog, or have trained one. You don't need to be a trainer — we have qualified reviewers for anything with welfare implications — but we'd rather you blinked at "correct the dog for growling" than tidied its grammar. Experience with cohort-based or drip-released programs Familiarity with Kajabi, Circle, or similar Practical 20–25 hrs/week, ongoing. Longer term if it works — this is the anchor role in our content org. $28–$38/hr depending on experience. We work UTC+2. Overlap of at least three hours with a South African working day matters — there's a lot of back-and-forth in the first month. First 90 days are an explicit trial, on both sides. We'll say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. We start with a paid test project ($120, roughly 3 hours) that is a real piece of the job. We pay for it whether or not we hire you. To apply Start your reply with the word BISCUIT and the name of a dog you know. Applications without it aren't read. In two or three sentences: describe a curriculum you architected, and one structural decision in it you'd defend. Link to one thing you made — a module map, a course outline, an assessment framework. We'd rather see a scruffy real artifact than a polished portfolio site. Tell us honestly how you use AI in your work. Please don't send a generic proposal. We can tell, and we read the ones that aren't first. Upwork screening questions Describe a curriculum or certification you architected from scratch. What was the module structure, and why that structure? How do you decide whether a learning outcome has actually been met? Give a real example of an assessment you designed. How do you use AI in your instructional design work today? Be specific about tools and where you don't use it. You review a lesson draft that's accurate, well written, and completely generic — it could be from any training brand. What do you do?