AI Program Mentor (remote, part-time, evening hours, $40 per hour)

Do you remember that person who made you realize your true potential? The one who championed you while you traversed the path towards academic or professional success.

Your mentor. Maybe you had one, or even several, if you were very lucky!

Do you want to be that mentor to younger students? Do you have computer science experience and expertise? Are you interested in learning and teaching about AI Gen AI, LLMs?

Yes, yes and yes? Great! We have an amazing opportunity for you!

SureStart is partnering with the XCL World Academy to host a designed for Grade 6 students.

The program runs from January through June 2026 and will teach skills related to AI, Gen AI, app development, innovation and entrepreneurship through a virtual program led by mentors.

We would love to have YOU as a mentor to help these Grade 6 students learn AI and app development skills while you also get the chance to be trained in — all while getting paid for your efforts.

Program Specifics:
As a Program Mentor you will coach a group of 6 students over the course of the 5 month program, providing guidance and advice. 

Location: Virtual (program sessions will be conducted over Zoom or similar platform)

Duration: January 6, 2026 through June 8, 2026; mentor training will take place in November 2025 (Exact datesTBD).  There will be 16 working weeks in this period and 7 weeks of break. Breaks are Feb 10 – 24, 2025; March 24 – April 7, 2025 and one additional week (TBD). 

As a mentor, your responsibilities will be to:

• Train, support and encourage a small group of six 6th grade students as they develop knowledge of AI/Gen AI, App development, AI ethics, and AI-driven Innovation and Entrepreneurship, using the provided curriculum.
• Specifically note your mentor schedule provided below.

The curricula for the program will be provided, and you will be coached and trained in the curriculum and given mentorship training.

Weekly Schedule:

• 1 hour attendance to the lead instructor’s virtual teaching session on on Monday evening (8:00-9:00pm ET / 5:00-6:00pm PT)
• 40-45 minute prep call on Monday evening with mentoring team lead
• 1 hour virtual teaching session on Tuesday evening (8:00-9:00pm ET Jan 6th – March 1st, 7:00 – 8:00 PM ET March 2nd-June 8th) with their student team
• 15 minutes post-student-session virtual debrief (may be 1 hour in the first week)
• 2 hours session prep time (scheduled at your discretion) 

Requirements for applicants

• Passionate about teaching and mentoring younger students; especially invested in mentoring students from backgrounds under-represented in science and technology;
• Currently enrolled or recent graduates from Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related fields;
• Have current/recent experience with middle school STEM teaching;
• Excellent communication, time-management and teamwork skills;
• Comfortable speaking to small groups in a virtual setting;
• Energetic and enthusiastic 
• Able to commit to 5 hours per week from January 6, 2026 through June 8, 2026
• Willing and able to commit to 3 hours per day for 6 days in November for training in the SureStart AI curriculum

Preferred but not required

• Mandarin fluency very useful to support bilingual students 
• Experience with front-end design, app design, and/or UI/UX development;
• Experience with AppInventor, Scratch or other block-based programming
• Familiarity with common GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc.

Benefits

• You will deepen your technical knowledge (look up ‘protege effect’)
• Work on exciting, challenging and rewarding work critical to the future of ethical AI 
• Build up your CV with fantastic leadership and team management experience
• Have the opportunity to attend technical talks, and professional skills seminars
• Valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders in tech and academia
• Be an integral part of a movement to build future AI leaders

If you’re excited about being a mentor but are hesitating about the requirements, go ahead and apply anyway – we’d love to hear from you!

Diverse minds building diverse technology is mission. We would love to see a wide variety of candidates presenting their unique perspectives, experiences, and skills. We are an equal opportunity employer and highly value diversity. SureStart does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Keywords for this job: AI, GenAI, app development, mobile app development, frontend design, HCI, human computer interaction, UI design, UX design, training, mentorship, MOOC, online training, data science jobs, machine learning jobs, machine vision, affective computing, emotion AI, Natural Language Processing, NLP, internships, interns, co-ops, speech recognition, tts, speech synthesis, image processing, HCI, human computer interaction, Python, Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, data scientist.

Student (College)