Quantum Academy has one staffing rule. Everyone who teaches here has done the work first. We keep the faculty small, add instructors slowly, and publish how we choose them. An organization that assesses candidates should show how it assesses its own faculty.
Two tracks with the same standard
Course Authors develop curriculum: a course, an exam domain, or a body of knowledge. Authorship is a permanent credit. Your name stays on the course page for as long as the material is taught. Authors also earn ongoing royalties on enrollment.
Instructors deliver the curriculum in live online, in-person, and private team sessions. Instructors are paid per session, with rates that rise with rank.
You can do both. Many of our best people author the course they then teach. Others author without teaching, or teach material that someone else wrote. Both tracks require the same practitioner experience.
What we look for
Three things, in this order. First, practitioner depth: years of hands-on work in the domain you would teach, with outcomes we can verify. Vendor certifications are welcome but secondary. We care what you have built, broken, migrated, or assessed. Second, the ability to teach. Explaining hard things clearly is a separate skill from doing them, and we test it directly. Third, alignment with how we work: evidence-based claims, no hype, no fear-selling, and precision in technical language. Our published content standards apply to every slide and every sentence, and every instructor has to work to them.
The process
1. Application. Write to instructors@quantumacademy.com with your CV or LinkedIn profile and the domain you want to teach or author in. Include links to anything you have published or presented, and two paragraphs on why this material and why you. We respond to every application, typically within two weeks.
2. Technical interview. A deep, practitioner-to-practitioner conversation with our faculty in your domain. Expect to go beyond definitions: we will ask about decisions you made, trade-offs you weighed, and things that went wrong.
3. Teaching audition. A recorded twenty-minute lesson on a topic we assign from our curriculum, delivered against a scoring rubric we share with you in advance. We evaluate structure, accuracy, clarity, and whether a practitioner audience would trust you. This is the stage most applicants find hardest, and we do not waive it.
4. Track trial. For authors: a course outline and one complete sample module, developed against our content standards with editorial feedback. For instructors: co-teaching or shadowing a live session with an existing faculty member, followed by a solo segment.
5. Appointment. Successful candidates join at the Instructor rank, or with the Course Author credit, or both. Compensation terms, including session rates and royalty structure, are shared in full before you begin the trial stage, so you never invest work without knowing the economics.
Ranks, and how they are earned
Faculty progress through four ranks: Instructor, Senior Instructor, Principal Instructor, and Fellow. Promotion is based on published criteria: sessions taught, learner evaluation scores, contribution to curriculum and exams, and peer review by existing senior faculty. Rank is never a function of seniority alone. An instructor who teaches brilliantly twice a year outranks one who teaches adequately every month. Fellows are appointed by invitation. The title recognizes years of work deciding what Quantum Academy teaches.
What you get
Beyond compensation, four things. A professional profile on our faculty page with your credentials and publications. Permanent authorship credit where you create curriculum. First access to teach new courses in your domain. A place on a small faculty that is accountable for the quality of the whole catalog.
Apply
Write to instructors@quantumacademy.com. Tell us your domain and show us your work. Then tell us what you would do differently from other instructors in your field. We usually decide whether to offer an interview based on that last answer.