Technical Author

About the Role: Technical Author at Canonical

Our ambition at Canonical 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. We are building documentation capacity at scale with dozens of positions available across the organization, at all levels from Graduate to Senior Staff.

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 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

Canonical offers different focuses for Technical Authors:

• Product-focused: As a member of a product engineering team, you will focus on a product or family of products, developing documentation that serves user needs and contributing to the product's long-term success and user experience quality.
• Customer-focused: Working in teams like Field Engineering, Customer Success, or Support, you'll address software documentation problems for users of complex Canonical software suites, often in custom configurations, developing a strong understanding of real-world product usage.
• Operations-focused: Part of a business team (e.g., Legal, HR, Talent), you will maintain and improve internal documentation such as employee handbooks, defining business communication patterns for a rapidly-growing organization.

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, collaborating with other experts to define documentation excellence and drive its development across the company and in the open-source software community.

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.
• 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.

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 Canonical Offers You:

We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide, revisited annually. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus or commission. We provide all team members with additional benefits, reflecting our values and ideals, balanced to meet local needs and ensure global fairness.

• 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.

Key skills/competency:

• Technical Communication
• Documentation Practice
• Diátaxis Approach
• Open Source Software
• Linux
• Command Line Interface
• Git Version Control
• reStructuredText
• MyST Markdown
• User Experience Design