Technical Author

Technical Author at Canonical

Our ambition is to set a standard of excellence in the industry for technical documentation and documentation practice. This is your chance to be a part of that, as a Technical Author at Canonical.

We are building documentation capacity at scale, with dozens of positions available across the organization, at all levels from Graduate to Senior Staff. All applications are handled through this one entry-point. To improve your chances, read our advice on how to get a job at Canonical.

These are not traditional technical writer roles. As a Technical Author, you will lead the documentation efforts of a Canonical team, whether in engineering, business operations, or another part of the company. You will combine excellence in technical communication with subject-matter expertise and the ability to collaborate with colleagues across the organization. Even the most junior Technical Authors will have the opportunity to develop and demonstrate technical authority, contributing to documentation practice as a first-class engineering and business discipline.

You will work with the Diátaxis approach to documentation and help elevate standards of technical writing through attention to theory and practice.

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.

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, documentation markup languages (reStructuredText, MyST)
• 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

What We Offer You:

• We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to ensure we recognise outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus or commission. We provide all team members with additional benefits, which reflect our values and ideals. We balance our programs to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.
• 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 Canonical:

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. Working here is a step into the future, and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer. We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.

Key skills/competency

• Technical Communication
• Documentation Standards
• Open Source Contribution
• User Experience (UX)
• Diátaxis Methodology
• Git Version Control
• Linux Command Line
• reStructuredText/MyST
• Community Engagement
• Software Development Contexts