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.
All applications and candidates are handled through this one entry-point.
To improve your chances of success in this application, read our advice on .
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 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.
Location: These are fully remote roles, open to candidates across the globe.
As a Technical Author you will
1. Create, maintain and improve software and other documentation
2. Work with your team members, to help them make effective documentation contributions
3. Influence the development of Canonical products and services, as an expert user who has important opinions about function and design
4. Engage with user communities to ensure that our documentation meets their needs
5. Encourage and support community engagement in and contribution to documentation
6. Help standardise the structure, presentation, style and language of content across products
7. Collaborate with documentation peers to advance the state of the art in documentation at Canonical
8. Challenge and advance documentation understanding and best-practice, as part of a disciplinary team
A strong candidate
9. Is an excellent collaborator and communicator
10. Cares deeply about functional written communication
11. Is a technical writer with a programmer’s mindset, or a programmer with a record of producing excellent documentation
12. Has a record of community engagement, in open-source software, documentation, research or other disciplines
13. Is sympathetic to the needs and challenges of open-source software and its communities
14. Demonstrates technical curiosity, and is fascinated by software technology and its challenges
15. Has demonstrable documentation skills, insight and enthusiasm
16. Has experience of software development contexts
17. Is familiar with: Linux, working on the command line, Git, Sphinx, reStructuredText
18. Holds a BSc/BA degree or equivalent
19. Is able to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events
Nice-to-have skills
20. Deep technical domain knowledge
21. Open-source community leadership and management
22. User-experience, interaction or visual design
What we offer you
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.
23. Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
24. Personal learning and development budget of USD 2, per year
25. Annual compensation review
26. Recognition rewards
27. Annual holiday leave
28. Maternity and paternity leave
29. Employee Assistance Programme
30. Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
31. Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long haul company events