Director of Academics and Operations

Why this role existsMiller is a training institute the Teceze group has designed but never launched. You are hired to open it, run it and make it pay.What exists: thirty full curricula — ten AI, twenty technology — each 60 classes of three hours; nine timings across weekday and weekend patterns; two programme types, Professional and Career with a 26-week internship; a working platform with trainer allocation, enrolment, ratings and three role portals; a marketing site with a course finder, thirty course pages and 270 FAQs; and the group's delivery reach across eleven APAC markets and the US.What does not: students, contracted trainers, revenue or published fees. The 1,800 per-class entries are generated scaffolding, not authored lesson material. Nobody reads the leads, counselling requests and enterprise enquiries the site collects, and no email or SMS is sent to anyone. Several student-facing promises — free counselling, two-day responses, replacement trainers, three months of LinkedIn Learning Premium valued at INR 25,000 — are not yet operationally or contractually backed.The mandateNinety days from your start date, three things must be true. A first cohort is teaching — on the published timetable, with contracted trainers, against material someone actually wrote. Fees are published and backed by a cohort-level cost model you can walk through line by line. And every enquiry is answered by a named person within a stated time, through a funnel you can measure. Year one is yours to plan once those three hold.What you will ownCurriculum and academic quality. Turn scaffolding into teaching material; decide what "ready to teach" means and refuse to launch a cohort below it. Keep the AI tracks current as models and tooling move. Own assessment — twelve checkpoints, the class-30 review, the panel-defended capstone, and what a Miller certificate actually asserts. Run a proper pilot on one track before committing the catalogue to market.Operations and delivery. Timetable and batch opening, attendance, labs, student support across 6 AM to 9 PM starts, trainer absence and cover, the enquiry-to-enrolment path, and the internship placements the Career programme already promises.Faculty. Recruit, audition, contract, coach and pay the trainer panel. Faculty supply is the most likely cap on year-one growth. The group's engineering bench is both the obvious first pool and an obvious trap: a strong engineer is not automatically a trainer.Marketing, admissions and sales. You carry the enrolment number personally. Set fees, build the channel mix, run admissions as a sales team, and audit every public claim — make it true or take it down.Enterprise. A managed-learning offer is already written: six services and three commercial models. Validate what is deliverable, price it, sell corporate cohorts, and sign nothing carrying SLAs that operations cannot hold.P&L. Build the cohort-level model before a fee is published, then own the levers: price, fill rate, trainer cost per contact hour, cost per enrolment, content amortisation. Report monthly on enrolments, revenue recognised versus collected, contribution by track, cash and forecast. Decide which tracks stay closed this year, and defend it.Compliance and team. Entity and licensing, student contracts, refund policy, data protection, advertising standards. Hire deliberately against the P&L, and own the technology backlog without writing the code.The first ninety daysDays 1–30 — read every curriculum, audit every public claim and either back it or remove it, draft the cohort-economics model, and name the three to five tracks that launch first.Days 31–60 — author and quality-assure the launch content, recruit and contract the first trainers, publish fees, and stand up enquiry handling with a named owner and a response SLA.Days 61–90 — run the pilot cohort and sit in it yourself, open paid enrolment on the launch tracks, turn on measured marketing spend, and present a year-one plan built on economics you have tested rather than assumed.How you are measuredContribution margin per cohort and overall; cost per enrolment by channel; batch fill rate; completion and capstone pass rates; student satisfaction and refund rate; active trainers and time to staff a batch; enterprise pipeline and SLA attainment; tracks at teaching standard. And one that outweighs its size — unbacked public claims, at zero within sixty days and staying there.What we need from youTen or more years in education, training or skills delivery, at least three carrying a revenue or P&L numberEvidence of building something from nothing, and a clear account of the parts that failedReal P&L ownership: you can build a unit-economics model and defend it under questioningA selling record you personally own — consumer admissions at volume, or enterprise training contractsOperational credibility somewhere a failure is visible to a customer within the hourEnough technical literacy to judge a curriculum and tell a strong trainer from a confident oneThe judgement to say no: to an unbacked claim, an unstaffable cohort, a model-breaking discountComfort doing work beneath your title for the first six monthsDesirable: experience in the APAC markets or the US, a live enterprise L&D network, a practitioner background in AI, cloud or security, and accreditation experience.#millerinstitute #mit