Technical Author (multiple roles and seniority levels)

Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote · Worldwide
Experience
3 years

Job description

Technical Author roles at Canonical focused on leading documentation efforts for product engineering, customer-facing, or business operations teams. The company is building documentation capacity at scale with multiple positions from Graduate to Senior Staff.

At a glance

Work mode
Remote · Worldwide

What you'll do

  • Create, maintain and improve software and other documentation
  • Work with team members to help them make effective documentation contributions
  • Influence the development of Canonical products and services as an expert user with opinions about function and design
  • Engage with user communities to ensure 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

What we're looking for

  • 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

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

Your team

Canonical's documentation practice team

Includes all the company's Technical Authors, 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.

Benefits

  • Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
  • Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
  • Annual compensation review
  • Recognition rewards
  • Annual holiday leave
  • Maternity and paternity leave
  • Employee Assistance Programme
  • Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
  • Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long haul company events
  • Performance-driven annual bonus or commission

Apply

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About Canonical

A pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open source projects and the platform for AI, IoT and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since its inception in 2004.

Mission

Changing the world of software as the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open source projects and the platform for AI, IoT and the cloud

Key facts

  • 2004
  • Open source software
  • Publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open source projects and the platform for AI, IoT and the cloud
  • Recruits on a global basis
  • Most colleagues have worked from home since its inception in 2004

What they value

  • Excellence
  • Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background