Director of Coaching Excellence

Role Overview

We are building leadership development infrastructure: the connective tissue that unifies fragmented talent development across organisations and careers. We are pre-seed stage, which means you are joining at the very beginning: no established processes, limited resources, maximum agency to build from scratch.

Our model: AI-powered practice at decision points + expert human coaching when stakes are high. The AI handles scale and immediacy. Human coaches handle nuance, breakthrough moments, and the messy complexity of real leadership challenges.

We need someone to build the entire coaching operation from scratch: sourcing exceptional coaches, designing selection and certification systems, managing the marketplace, ensuring quality at scale, and continuously improving coaching efficacy based on outcome data. This is about democratising executive-level coaching and building a specialised coaching model for managers under pressure in high-growth companies.

What You Will Build

Coaching model design:create a specialised methodology for leaders under pressure, not generic executive coaching, but targeted work on decision-making under stress, failure pattern debugging, and behaviour change.

Coach network:sourcing, selection, training, and certification. You will define what great looks like for this specific context and build the systems to find, vet, and develop coaches who meet that bar.

Marketplace operations:matching, scheduling, quality feedback loops. The operational backbone that makes coaching scalable without sacrificing quality.

Quality assurance:continuous improvement based on outcome data. Coaching should be measurable, you will build the systems to prove it.

Business model:coaching economics, utilisation, margins, compensation models, scalability, leverage. You understand how to make coaching both excellent and financially viable.

Most of this will be yours to design. We will have constraints (budget, timeline, outcome targets), but the how is your domain.

Who You Are

Required Depth

815+ years in executive coaching, leadership development, or performance psychology, you have personally coached leaders through high-stakes situations

ICF PCC/MCC (or equivalent) + demonstrable expertise beyond the credential, you know what creates behaviour change, not just what the textbook says

Operations/marketplace experience: you have built or managed a coaching practice, consulting team, or professional services operation, you understand sourcing, vetting, quality control, utilisation, retention

High-growth company fluency: you have worked with (or coached in) startups, scale-ups, or high-intensity environments, you understand the pressure managers face

Builder Mindset + Strategic Thinking

Startup-ready:comfortable with ambiguity, resource constraints, wearing multiple hats. You will be coach, ops manager, recruiter, trainer, and quality controller on Day 1.

Systems thinker:energised by creating infrastructure: selection rubrics, training curricula, quality scorecards, operational playbooks. You create templates, not follow them.

Quality obsessed:you would rather grow slowly with exceptional coaches than scale quickly with mediocre ones.

Data-informed:coaching should be measurable. You are comfortable using outcome data to optimise efficacy.

Coaching as business:you understand coaching economics: utilisation, margins, compensation models, scalability. You can position value to individuals AND to CHROs/CFOs.

Platform integration:you understand how human coaching fits with AI: when managers need human vs. machine, how coaches use platform data, what the handoff looks like.

Risk tolerance:willing to take a non-traditional compensation structure for the opportunity to build something significant from the ground up.

Nice-to-Have

I/O psychology or organisational development background; experience building coaching marketplaces or platforms

Published thought leadership on coaching methodology

Experience in the Indian market, multilingual capability, or familiarity with Asian work cultures

What We Offer

Intellectual freedom:build a new coaching model, not replicating generic executive coaching, but creating specialised methodology for leaders under pressure. Solve how AI-powered practice and human coaching complement each other. Your model will be measured: if it works, you prove it; if not, you fix it.

Equity stake available(meaningful ownership, not token options), earned through performance and mutual fit, not guaranteed upfront. Coaching is co-equal with tech, direct influence on product strategy.

Non-traditional compensation:founding role at a pre-seed company. The structure reflects high ownership and asymmetric upside, not a corporate salary band. If we succeed, your outcomes could be multiples of a corporate coaching leadership role. Risk is real, do not apply unless you are genuinely excited by this trade-off.

Location, Education & Working Style

Base: Ideally Mumbai. We want the founding team together. Travel to coach meet-ups, pilot sites, industry events.

Working style: high autonomy, high accountability. We care about outcomes, not hours.

Education:Masters in Psychology, OB, OD, HR, or related field + ICF PCC/MCC (or equivalent). OR Masters + 1012 years senior coaching/leadership development experience. Preferred: advanced degree from premier institution; coaching specialisations; professional psychology background.

Application Process

We want to see:

CV + portfolio:show us what you have built, coaching programmes you have designed, teams you have led, quality systems you have created, measurable outcomes you have driven.

Design sample (300500 words):sketch out how you would select coaches for leadership under pressure work. What competencies matter? How would you test for them?

Ready to build? These roles are not for everyone. We are asking you to tolerate uncertainty and build something from scratch with no guarantees. But if you are energised by that trade-off, if you want to architect foundational coaching infrastructure rather than execute someone elses playbook, we want to talk.