Hiring: Senior Strategist - Future of Education and AI Innovation Company: Western Governors University Location: Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area Job Posted Time: 2026-09-10 10:43:01 Employment Type: Full-time / Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : Accessibility, LLM, Machine Learning, Product Strategy, Program Management, Project Management, REST, Workday About the job Experience: •4+ years of experience in strategic planning, product strategy, program management, or applied research within higher education or a similar industry. Required Skills: •This position will be based on-site at our Salt Lake City, UT office. •Innovation Portfolio Ownership: Own a portfolio of Innovation initiatives end-to-end, from problem framing and hypothesis through prototype, evaluation, and handoff or sunset. Recommend which initiatives advance, scale, or stop. •Strategy Development: Develop AI strategies that connect emerging capabilities to specific student outcomes and institutional priorities. Translate broad direction from leadership into scoped, testable workstreams. •Prototyping and Experimentation: Design and build prototypes and experiments that test whether an approach works before the university invests in it. Define the question, the method, and the threshold for success in advance. •Evidence and Evaluation Design: Set the evaluation design for assigned initiatives, including instrumentation, measures, comparison conditions, and analysis plan. Produce findings that partners can act on and defend. •Data Analysis and Insight: Analyze quantitative and qualitative data to produce insights that change decisions. Distinguish signal from noise and state confidence honestly. •Cross-Functional Partnership: Build durable working relationships with academic programs, assessment, technology, institutional research, and student-facing operations. Secure the alignment an initiative needs before it needs it. •Responsible AI Practice: Apply the university’s Responsible AI standards throughout design and deployment. Identify ethical, legal, privacy, accessibility, and bias risks early, document them, and drive mitigation with the AI Ethicist and governance partners. Qualifications: •Comprehensive expertise in AI and machine learning technologies, including current model capabilities, limitations, and failure modes. •Solid functional working knowledge of synthetic data, evaluation methodology, and experimental design. •Strong quantitative skills, including proficiency with data analysis tooling and the judgment to choose the right method for the question. •Demonstrated capacity to frame ambiguous problems, define success criteria, and produce a plan others can follow. •Fluency in the ethical, legal, privacy, and accessibility considerations that govern AI in education. •Excellent written communication. Ability to produce documents that survive executive scrutiny. •Strong interpersonal skills and credibility with technical and academic audiences alike. •Advanced project management skills, including the ability to run several concurrent initiatives at different stages. •Comfort with uncertainty, rapid iteration, and work that may be discontinued based on evidence. •Demonstrated capacity to mentor and elevate the work of less experienced colleagues. Compensation: •$109,900 - $170,400 / year Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!