Technical Author (multiple roles and seniority levels)

The role of a Technical Author

A product-focused Technical Author is a member of a product engineering team, typically focused on a product or family of products. In this role you'll help the team develop documentation that serves the needs of the product's users. You will have responsibility for the quality of the user experience with the product, and will contribute towards the long-term success of the project itself.

A customer-focused Technical Author works in a team such as Field Engineering, Customer Success or Support, dealing with users of complex suites of Canonical software products, sometimes deployed in custom configurations. In this role you’ll take a responsive approach to software documentation problems and develop a strong understanding of how products work together and are used in the real world.

An operations-focused Technical Author is part of a business team, for example Legal, HR or Talent. An important part of this work is to maintain internal documentation, such as employee handbooks. In this role you will help develop and improve materials that hundreds of colleagues rely on daily, and define patterns of business communication for a rapidly-growing organisation.

Some open technical author roles at Canonical

You’ll have a chance to tell us your preferred focus, and we'll work with you to find the right seniority level and team for you.

Whatever your focus, you will also be a part of Canonical's documentation practice team, that includes all the company's Technical Authors. Here, you'll be amongst other documentation experts, who collaborate to define documentation excellence and drive the development of documentation practice and theory, across the company and in the open-source software community.

Location: These are fully remote roles, open to candidates across the globe.

As a Technical Author you will

• Create, maintain and improve software and other documentation
• Work with your team members, to help them make effective documentation contributions
• Influence the development of Canonical products and services, as an expert user who has important opinions about function and design
• Engage with user communities to ensure that our documentation meets their needs
• Encourage and support community engagement in and contribution to documentation
• Help standardise the structure, presentation, style and language of content across products
• Collaborate with documentation peers to advance the state of the art in documentation at Canonical
• Challenge and advance documentation understanding and best-practice, as part of a disciplinary team

A strong candidate

• Is an excellent collaborator and communicator
• Cares deeply about functional written communication
• Is a technical writer with a programmer’s mindset, or a programmer with a record of producing excellent documentation
• Has a record of community engagement, in open-source software, documentation, research or other disciplines
• Is sympathetic to the needs and challenges of open-source software and its communities
• Demonstrates technical curiosity, and is fascinated by software technology and its challenges
• Has demonstrable documentation skills, insight and enthusiasm
• Has experience of software development contexts
• Is familiar with: Linux, working on the command line, Git, Sphinx, reStructuredText
• Holds a BSc/BA degree or equivalent
• Is able to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events

Nice-to-have skills

• Deep technical domain knowledge
• Open-source community leadership and management
• User-experience, interaction or visual design