Test-Driven Development (TDD) Coach

About Skiller Whale:

Skiller Whale changes what tech teams are capable of with live team coaching sessions led by subject-matter experts. Developers typically attend a 60-90 minute session every week or two, learning something new through challenging exercises with an expert leading the session to explain the topic and answer difficult questions. Learners love us (they give us an average rating of 4.8 / 5) and we have a measurable impact on the teams we work with.

The Role:

Skiller Whale is looking for experts to teach remote sessions to various tech teams. Currently we are specifically looking for experts in test-driven development, to coach other software engineers in how (and why) to effectively apply TDD to improve the quality of the software they build.

All our teaching is done through the Skiller Whale platform, which includes video conferencing and other tooling designed to make teaching as slick as possible. High quality written content and exercises are provided by Skiller Whale, so you shouldn’t need to do significant preparation before a session (we assume ½ - 1 hour to get familiar with the material, and we pay for preparation the first time a module is taught).

Your job is to provide learners with exceptional teaching and help them to deeply understand the topic being covered. This means you'll need to have significant expertise in the topics being taught, and be able to answer difficult questions and debug errors live, as well as explain advanced concepts clearly and succinctly. The vast majority of our coaches are senior software engineers.

We would initially require 2-5 hours of teaching time per week, depending on your availability. The sessions are usually scheduled for a regular, repeating time-slot, so you can fit them into your calendar. We regularly start coaching plans with new customers, so over time, there will likely be more sessions to lead if you have availability.

Requirements:

We want to be seen as intelligent, playful learners. Our customers need to trust us to teach their engineers how they should be building software and working effectively in a team that uses TDD in the real world. For our coaches, that means:

Knowledge & Understanding

You should come across (legitimately) as an expert on TDD, able to expand beyond the provided material when appropriate. E.g: examples from your experience with TDD in different settings; tooling or setup that you've found works well; how test order has impacted code structure in your experience, and more generally how TDD interacts with software design; other approaches to testing software, and their relative strengths and weaknesses; testing at different levels etc..

Clear Explanations

You must be able to deliver clear and concise explanations in spoken English and be able to adapt your explanation style to match the level of your audience.

Expert Spoken and Written English

You should be expert and eloquent in spoken English, with an accent that will be clear to non-native (but fluent) speakers from various backgrounds. You should be able to quickly understand questions with complex phrasing or grammar and identify when clarification is needed.

Personable, Passionate and Professional.

You should be able to build rapport with new groups of people easily, being friendly whilst maintaining professionalism.

Live Debugging

You should be comfortable looking at code, quickly understanding how it works (or why it doesn’t), and identifying bugs or potential improvements under time pressure (e.g. live in a session).

Industry Experience with TDD

In order to talk about TDD with confidence, it’s important that you’ve used it extensively! Learners may well ask about how things are really done in practice.

Bonus Points For:

Teaching / mentoring experience.

Experience teaching groups of more junior developers, or mentoring other developers (even in an unofficial capacity).

Multi-Language experience.

All the people we teach are already software developers, but will come from various backgrounds / have experience with different programming languages. Having context from those is sometimes useful to help learners’ understanding.

We’ve built most of our learning materials for TDD using JavaScript, but with exercises designed in a way that shouldn't require previous experience with the language. Experience with the JavaScript is not a requirement, however being familiar would be a bonus, and help when debugging learners’ exercises, troubleshooting their issues, and answering questions related to code snippets.

If you don’t have JavaScript experience, but are very confident with TDD, then you should be fine - our focus is on the principles / discipline, rather than anything language specific.

Should you require any accommodations during the interview process, please reach out to Dave Millican ([email protected]) to let him know. We’re always happy to help and will do everything we can to accommodate you.

Benefits

• Rate: £100 per hour (+ paid £50 for preparation for each new module taught)
• Very flexible work - we will aim to schedule sessions that fit your availability, and you have no ongoing commitment.
• Fully remote, forever.
• Have a real impact on learners. Our sessions actually make people better at their jobs.