Technical Author

Responsibilities

• 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
• 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
• Challenge and advance documentation understanding and best-practice

Requirements

• Excellent collaborator and communicator
• Cares deeply about functional written communication
• Technical writer with a programmer’s mindset, or a programmer with a record of producing excellent documentation
• Record of community engagement in open-source software, documentation, research or other disciplines
• Sympathetic to the needs and challenges of open-source software and its communities
• Demonstrates technical curiosity and fascination with software technology
• Demonstrable documentation skills, insight and enthusiasm
• Experience of software development contexts
• Familiar with Linux, working on the command line, Git, Sphinx, reStructuredText
• Holds a BSc/BA degree or equivalent
• Able to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events

Preferred Qualifications

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

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

About the Company

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. We expect excellence — in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since its inception in 2004.