Technical Author – Ubuntu and Canonical products at Canonical

Job Description

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We deliver open source to the world faster, more securely and more cost effectively than any other company. If you’re interested in a career at Canonical, we are a remote-first company so please apply to any suitable role as skills are valued more than location, despite some having a preferred geographic preference.

The role of a Technical Author

You’ll be part of an engineering team, focused on a specific Canonical product area. You will lead the team effort to create, maintain and improve documentation that serves the needs of the product’s users, embracing the principles of the Diátaxis documentation framework You will have a broad impact on – and responsibility for – the quality of the user experience with the product, and will contribute towards the long-term success of the project itself. As the Technical Author on the team, you will collaborate with software developers, product managers, community members, other documentation authors, information architects, quality assurance engineers and technical support engineers to develop clear documentation for complex technical topics. You’ll be part of our effort to establish documentation as a first-class engineering discipline. You 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. Location: This is a fully remote role, open to candidates across the globe.

What you’ll do on a regular basis

Create, maintain and improve software documentation Work with engineering team members, to help them make effective documentation contributions Influence the development of the product, as an expert user of the product, who has important opinions about its 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

Our best candidate

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, application deployment, system operations, and infrastructure management, Git, documentation markup languages Has excellent written and verbal communication skills Holds a BSc/BA degree or equivalent Is able to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events

Additional skills that you might also bring

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