Technical Author (multiple roles and seniority levels)

Job Description

Canonical is seeking a Technical Author to join their team. The Technical Author will be responsible for leading documentation efforts for a Canonical team. The role involves collaboration with colleagues across the organization, technical communication, and subject-matter expertise. This position offers the opportunity to develop technical authority and contribute to documentation practice as a first-class engineering and business discipline.

The Technical Author will work with the Diátaxis approach to documentation and help elevate standards of technical writing. This role presents a unique opportunity to influence the development of Canonical products and services and to engage with user communities.

Role Involves:

• Creating, maintaining, and improving software and other documentation
• Collaborating with team members to help them make effective documentation contributions
• Influencing the development of Canonical products and services
• Engaging with user communities to ensure documentation meets their needs
• Standardizing the structure, presentation, style, and language of content
• Advancing documentation understanding and best-practice

Requirements:

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills
• Care for functional written communication
• Technical writing skills with a programmer’s mindset, or programming skills with documentation experience
• Record of community engagement
• Sympathy to open-source software
• Technical curiosity
• Demonstrable documentation skills, insight, and enthusiasm
• Experience of software development contexts
• Familiarity with Linux, command line, Git, documentation markup languages (reStructuredText, MyST)
• BSc/BA degree or equivalent
• Ability to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events

What Canonical Offers:

• Distributed work environment
• 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