Technical Author (multiple roles and seniority levels)

<p>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 <strong>Technical Author at Canonical</strong>.</p>
<p>We are building documentation capacity at scale. <strong>We have dozens of positions available</strong>, for teams and products across the organisation, at all levels from Graduate to Senior Staff.</p>
<p><strong>All applications and candidates are handled through this one entry-point.</strong>&nbsp;</p>
<p>To improve your chances of success in this application, read our advice on <a href="https://canonical.com/blog/how-to-get-a-job-at-canonical">how to get a job at Canonical</a>.</p>
<p><strong>These are not traditional technical writer roles.</strong> As a Technical Author, you will lead the documentation efforts of a Canonical team, in engineering, business operations or another part of the company.&nbsp;</p>
<p>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&nbsp;<a href="https://canonical.com/documentation">documentation practice</a> as a first-class engineering and business discipline.</p>
<p>You will work with the <a href="https://diataxis.fr/">Diátaxis approach to documentation</a> and help elevate standards of technical writing through attention to theory and practice.</p>
<h3><strong>The role of a Technical Author</strong></h3>
<p>A <strong>product-focused Technical Author</strong> 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&nbsp; the quality of the user experience with the product, and will contribute towards the long-term success of the project itself.</p>
<p>A <strong>customer-focused Technical Author</strong> 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.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>An <strong>operations-focused Technical Author</strong> 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.</p>
<p><a href="https://canonical.com/documentation/open-roles">Some open technical author roles at Canonical</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Whatever your focus, you will also be a part of <strong>Canonical's documentation practice team</strong>, 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.</p>
<p><strong>Location: </strong>These are fully remote roles, open to candidates across the globe.&nbsp;</p>
<h3><strong>As a Technical Author you will</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Create, maintain and improve software and other documentation</li>
<li>Work with your team members, to help them make effective documentation contributions</li>
<li>Influence the development of Canonical products and services, as an expert user who has important opinions about function and design</li>
<li>Engage with user communities to ensure that our documentation meets their needs&nbsp;</li>
<li>Encourage and support community engagement in and contribution to documentation</li>
<li>Help standardise the structure, presentation, style and language of content across products</li>
<li>Collaborate with documentation peers to advance the state of the art in documentation at Canonical</li>
<li>Challenge and advance documentation understanding and best-practice, as part of a disciplinary team&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<h3><strong>A strong candidate</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Is an excellent collaborator and communicator</li>
<li>Cares deeply about functional written communication</li>
<li>Is a technical writer with a programmer’s mindset, or a programmer with a record of producing excellent documentation</li>
<li>Has a record of community engagement, in open-source software, documentation, research or other disciplines</li>
<li>Is sympathetic to the needs and challenges of open-source soft