Technical Editor [Remote

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.

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. 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.

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.

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

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

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 experience of software development contexts

Linux, working on the command line, Git, documentation markup languages (reStructuredText, MyST)

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

Deep technical domain knowledge

Open-source community leadership and management

User-experience, interaction or visual design

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 balance our programs to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.

Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year

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

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. 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.

Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products.