PostgreSQL Coach (Flexible) in London - Skiller Whale

Job Description Skiller Whale changes what tech teams are capable of with live team coaching sessions led by subject-matter experts. Developers attend a 1-hour session every couple of weeks, learning something new through challenging exercises with an expert leading the session to give extra context and answer difficult questions. No video lectures, ever. 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.

Position Summary:

Skiller Whale is looking for experts to lead remote coaching sessions for various tech teams. Currently we are specifically looking for expertise in Advanced Postgres.

All our coaching is done through the Skiller Whale platform, which includes video conferencing and other tooling designed to make coaching sessions as slick as possible. High quality written content and exercises are provided by Skiller Whale, so coaches shouldn't need to do significant preparation before a session (we assume ½ hour to read through the material, and we pay for that time).

The coach's job is to provide learners with an exceptional experience and help them to deeply understand the topic being covered. This means they need to deeply understand the technology, be able to answer difficult questions and debug code errors live, as well as explain advanced concepts clearly and succinctly. Industry experience is also useful to make learning relevant to real-world software problems.

This would initially require between 2-4 hours of coaching time per week, and would be an ongoing relationship. We are growing significantly, so over time, there will likely be more sessions to lead.

Requirements

Essential Requirements:

We want to be seen as Intelligent, playful learners, who our customers trust to coach them in how they should be writing code in the real world. For our coaches, that means:

Content Knowledge

You should come across (legitimately) as an expert in the technology you coach, able to expand beyond the provided material when appropriate. This should extend to knowledge about how the topic you're teaching is used in practice/industry, and how it relates to other aspects of the technology.

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. You should be able to 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, while 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

In order to talk about your technology with confidence, it's important that you've used it in the real world: 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 developers, often with different primary programming languages. Having context from those is sometimes useful to help learners' understanding.

Additional Frameworks

Many learners will be used to using a framework/library related to the tech you're teaching. Experience in these will help you link ideas for them. For example, for Postgres, it might be PgBouncer or pgAdmin.

Benefits

Rate: £100 per hour (+ paid ½ hour prep time for each new module taught)
Flexible work options
Fully remote work, forever
Work with smart, interesting people who love learning new things as much as you do
Learn something new every day: in this role, you'll be learning new things at a much faster pace than most engineers could hope for