Title: Manager - Founders Office

Location: Pune, INDIA

Department: Founders Office

Job Description:

Remote

Full-Time

We Want To Change The World. We Believe It Starts With Education.

In India, 100 million children from low-income communities grow up without access to the 21st-century skills they need to thrive — from emotional intelligence and digital literacy to everyday money management. This gap leads to a lifetime of limited opportunity, intergenerational poverty, and rising mental health concerns.

What Are We Doing?

At The Apprentice Project (TAP), we're building India's boldest bet on education equity — an AI-powered learning buddy that helps thousands of government school students unlock 21st-century skills. We don't just teach coding or financial literacy — we spark self-confidence, creativity, and lifelong curiosity in children who've been told to "stay in their lane."

We're not looking for employees. We're looking for co-builders — people who want to create generational change, one student at a time.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for someone exceptionally sharp — someone who can absorb a complex technology stack, understand why it matters to a funder, and write about it in a way that is precise, compelling, and impossible to replicate. You don't need a long fundraising CV. You need a mind that works fast, a natural instinct for structure and planning, and the ability to translate hard technical and programmatic realities into proposals that land.

TAP's differentiation to funders — especially tech-heavy CSR teams and institutional players — is our technology and government partnerships: a PAL system on WhatsApp, an AI assessment pipeline running across 150,000+ students, genuinely hard engineering in a government-school context. The person who writes our proposals needs to actually understand that stack and articulate it credibly. We will train you on the grants craft. We cannot train sharpness.

If you have strong analytical instincts, love getting into the detail of how things work, and can write with clarity and conviction — you'll thrive here.

About The Role

Location: Remote / Pune

Reports to: Head of Fundraising & Partnerships

Type: Full-time

What You'll Do

Donor Cultivation & Relationship Management

• Build and manage a pipeline of institutional funding opportunities across foundations, CSR programmes, and philanthropic partners.
• Move donors effectively through the full fundraising lifecycle — from first contact to long-term partnership.
• Engage with senior stakeholders including foundation leadership and program officers.

Proposal Strategy & Development

• Research funders deeply and develop proposals that speak directly to their priorities and decision-making logic.
• Translate TAP's technology, government partnerships, and impact data into compelling, credible funding narratives.
• Coordinate with internal teams — product, data, program, and leadership — to ensure proposals are accurate, specific, and differentiated.

Grant Management & Reporting

• Manage grant timelines, reporting requirements, and compliance across active partnerships.
• Ensure post-award relationship management is handled with rigour and consistency.
• Support renewal conversations with strong stewardship and evidence.

Foundation Intelligence & Pipeline Development

• Research the institutional and CSR funding landscape — who funds what, how they decide, and where TAP fits.
• Identify and qualify new opportunities and maintain a well-organised pipeline.
• Track conversations, next steps, and deadlines with precision.

Who You Are

Intellectual Sharpness

• Strong critical, analytical, and numerical thinking — this is the base gate.
• Demonstrated through a quantitative background (math, stats, science, engineering) and doing well in it, or prior work that clearly demanded rigorous analytical thinking.
• Able to absorb a complex technology or program model quickly and explain it simply and accurately.

Planning & Organisation

• A natural planner — detail-oriented, able to anticipate, and comfortable managing multiple workstreams simultaneously.
• You see this in how they structure documents, manage timelines, and approach ambiguous problems.
• Strong written communication — clear, precise, and persuasive.

Replicated Experience (Bonus)

• Prior experience cultivating and converting foundation or institutional leads — particularly agency-fund-type donors — is a strong plus.
• If you've managed the full grants lifecycle with comparable donors before, tell us specifically: which funders, what you owned, and what converted.

Skills You Bring

• Research & Analysis: Ability to go deep on a funder, a technology, or a sector and surface what actually matters.
• Proposal Writing: Clear, structured, and specific — you write to persuade, not to fill pages.
• Planning & Follow-Through: Strong pipeline discipline, deadline management, and attention to the details that determine whether a grant is won or lost.
• Tech Fluency: Genuinely curious about how technology works and able to engage credibly with technical content in a fundraising context.

What Success Looks Like

• Proposals are specific, credible, and differentiated — funders can tell they were written by someone who actually understands TAP's work.
• The pipeline is well-organised, regularly updated, and moving.
• Grants are reported on time and managed with care.
• New funding opportunities are identified proactively and qualified rigorously.
• Relationships with funders deepen over time.

Why Join Us?

Because this is not a conventional grants role. You will work at the intersection of education, technology, and philanthropy — writing about some of the most interesting applied AI work happening in Indian schools today. You will be trained directly on the fundraising craft by TAP's leadership. And the proposals you write will determine how many children TAP can reach over the next several years. If you want a role where your intelligence is the product — this is it.

What You Can Expect?

• Direct mentorship: You will be trained on the grants craft personally by TAP's fundraising leadership.
• Real ownership: Build and manage your own portfolio of funder relationships from day one.
• Intellectual challenge: Every proposal requires you to understand something new — about technology, about government systems, about what moves a funder.
• Supportive culture: Collaborative teams, open communication, and shared purpose.
• Sector-aligned compensation: Competitive salary in line with experience and nonprofit standards.