Developer Educator, tidyverse package development

Posit (formally RStudio) creates software that helps people understand data and make better decisions in real-world applications. Our core offering is an open-source data science toolchain used by millions worldwide, and we aim to make it available to everyone, regardless of their economic means. We’re a Certified B Corporation®, which means we’ve written our open-source mission into our corporate charter. Our commercial products support this work, which helps data scientists manage their work and share the results with others.

About the Open Source group

The Open Source group aims to provide a seamless end-to-end data science experience, and to help data scientists learn the software engineering skills they need. We develop and maintain open source packages for data science and scientific communication, including R packages like the tidyverse, tidymodels, and sparklyr, Shiny for R and Python, and Quarto. The goals of the Open Source group are not only to provide a seamless end-to-end experience, but also to help users learn and flourish. This involves developing and disseminating documentation and fostering a welcoming community. We value kindness, humility, openness, and resourcefulness in our work and interactions with the community and each other. 

About the role

As a part of helping users learn and flourish, our mission includes teaching folks how to develop packages. Developer educators are a key part of working towards this mission. We recognize that it’s very hard to teach something well if you don’t have the opportunity to do it with some regularity. The developer educator role is therefore dual purpose - you will be both a developer and an educator. While you’ll have a clear mandate around teaching package development, we also expect you to spend a nontrivial amount of time engaging in package development activities, particularly on packages like roxygen2, testthat, devtools, and usethis that form a fundamental part of our package development workflow. We expect you’ll contribute particularly to documentation and error messages, but you’ll also articulate user needs and work with the primary maintainer to implement bigger features.

You are a typical member of the developer community we want to serve: someone with R package development experience, but it’s never been your main or only job. This background allows you to connect with the developer community, understand pain points, and produce open, accessible and polished materials to onboard new package developers and to help part-time developers maintain their packages over time. You’ll know how to use content creation tools, such as markdown, video and github to produce pedagogically appropriate and accessible resources to guide package developers and highlight relevant use cases for different segments of the community.

We particularly encourage folks who are fluent in Spanish to apply. We want to help better support the Latin American R community to continue to build out documentation and learning resources.

Things you’ll own

• Learning resources focused on the first-time package developer. You’ll help folks to get over the initial hump to make their first package using documentation, blog posts, videos and social media.
• Learning resources focused on the part-time package developer. You’ll create periodic round-ups of important changes to the landscape (R, CRAN, devtools, etc.) to help these maintainers use their limited development time wisely.
• Become a product expert. Steep yourself in the experiences that users have when building packages with our tools, and champion ease, clarity, and transparency in our documentation and workflows
• Coordinate and package development teach workshops (in-person and/or online). There are lots of people in the community who are already teaching package development; we want you to help them do it even better.
• Tidyverse developer days. You’ll help organise our twice yearly in-person tidyverse developer days and help figure out how we can make them work virtually too.

Things you’ll help with

• Developing a strategy for developing and disseminating learning resources.
• Developing resources that help the intermediate package developers become experts, by drawing on the package development expertise of the entire tidyverse team.
• Maintenance of the roxygen2, testthat, devtools, and usethis packages.
• Champion a diverse and welcoming community of learners and integrate accessibility into our resources.
• Advocate for the needs of our package developer community who are newer to our tools and bring their feedback back to the open source teams.
• User testing with package developers

Things you’ll teach the team

• Effective, inclusive and accessible pedagogical practices
• Community building and facilitation approaches

Things you’ll learn

• Working on highly visible open source tools in the public 
• New approaches to developing and editing learning resources
• How our open source developers work

About you

• Has developed at least one R package.
• Experienced user of git and GitHub.
• Has developed documentation, tutorials or other learning materials used by other educators
• Knowledgeable in digital and educational accessibility good practices 
• Experience teaching coding or data science workshops or courses
• Experience working with online communities, global or multi-lingual communities a plus
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

What to expect

Within 1 month, you will … 

• Learned about our open source tools, package development practices and team
• Submitted at least 1 PR to improve our documentation of the package development process.
• Joined and met with our developer relations squad
• Met with a few representative package development learners in the community

Within 3 months, you will…

• Developed learning resources
• Co-taught a workshop on package development
• Contributed to dissemination of resources through blog posts and social media
• Be responding to some package developer questions through our forums
• Be actively fostering connections with segments of the package development learning community
• Worked with the developer relations squad to contribute to the strategy of developing and disseminating data science learning resources

Within 6 months, you will…

• Be executing on creating and disseminating learning resources identified collaboratively with the developer relations team
• Posting on our social media channels with support
• Coordinated and taught a package development workshop as the lead instructor
• Have created learner communities in particular domains and/or spoken languages to receive feedback on learning resources and identifying resources to create
• Have developed ideas for a project of developing resources and teaching workshops that you will own

Within 12 months, you will.. 

• Have developed and are running a package developer workshop program
• Have your own project of developing resources that you will largely set goals and milestones for 
• Be executing on these learning resources goals and deliverables
• Regularly posting through our social media channels
• Strong connections with segments of the package development learning community

About us:

• We welcome all talented colleagues and are committed to a culture that represents diversity in all its forms.
• We prioritize giving ourselves “focus time” to get deep work done. We minimize meetings and attempt to operate asynchronously.
• We are a learning organization and take mentorship and career growth seriously. We hope to learn from you and we anticipate that you will also deepen your skills, influence, and leadership as a result of working at Posit.
• We operate under a unique sustainable business model: We have over 50% of our engineering dedicated to creating free and open source software.  We are profitable and we plan to be around decades from now.

Notable:

We offer competitive compensation with extensive human-first, people-focused benefits to prioritize your personal and financial well-being.

• 100% of medical, dental, and vision insurance premiums are covered for employees and their families! Fertility and gender-affirming healthcare is included in all of our plans.
• Supplemental mental health and wellness benefits are available via Ginger even if you don’t opt in to our insurance plans, including Ginger for teen family members.
• Posit’s gender-neutral paid parental leave policy covers all new parents, including foster and adoptive parents.
• Our 401k matches up to 50% of the maximum employee contribution after six months.
• An annual profit-sharing bonus for employees recognizes our team’s contributions to company performance across the year.
• We are a 100% distributed team. You are also welcome to come into our Seattle or Boston offices. 
  • Our remote office allowance includes: 
    • $1000 home office allowance plus an additional $800 for equipment
    • Up to $400 monthly reimbursement for coworking space rental
• We provide a flexible environment with a generous vacation policy that encourages a minimum of four weeks PTO per year plus 13 paid company holidays.

Posit is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applicants of different backgrounds, cultures, genders, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, or length of time spent unemployed.

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