About the role

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. We have dozens of positions available, for teams and products across the organisation, 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, 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 organisation. 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.

What you'll do

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

What we're looking for

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, Sphinx, reStructuredText
Holds a BSc/BA degree or equivalent

Nice to have

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

What you'll get

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

How you'll work

Location: These are fully remote roles, open to candidates across the globe.

Is able to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events

About the company & team

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.

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.

Some open technical author roles at Canonical

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.

Additional information

All applications and candidates are handled through this one entry-point.

To improve your chances of success in this application, read our advice on how to get a job at Canonical.

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.

Technical Author (multiple Roles and Seniority Levels)

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