Technical Writer

Job Description

What We’re Looking For

A Technical Writer who is passionate about creating clear, engaging documentation for an audience of both users and developers. You’ll be someone who can absorb technical information quickly and explain it in an easy to understand way. You’ll be creating release notes and guides for developers and users, including API references, all of which must be kept up to date with product features.

You must be able to demonstrate experience of creating online documentation and an understanding of how to present technical information in video, eLearning and other formats. If you have a background in software development, or can at least read and understand code, then that would be an advantage.

You should have experience of using a range of tools for online documentation and be able to adapt to new tools as they are adopted. Our documentation is currently written in markdown, so we would prefer candidates who are comfortable working in that format or are keen to learn. We also adopt the “documentation as code” approach and use source control, so if you’re comfortable using GitHub or Bitbucket, then so much the better. If not, then we’ll train you.

We’ll give priority to candidates who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about web technologies and understand what tools and technologies developers use to integrate with our products. If you’ve got some experience of JavaScript and frameworks including React, Vue or Angular, or if you’ve coded or created documentation for code in other languages, then we’d like to hear from you. If you don’t have a coding background but you write great documentation and are keen to increase your skills, then we’ll help you learn.

This is a role that requires a lot of collaboration- with product owners, developers, product marketing and other teams in the business. You should work well in a team and be comfortable taking your own initiative to find out information and get things done. You’ll be creating documentation that keeps in sync with product releases, so you must be able to work quickly, but still ensure the quality and accuracy of what you produce. We’re agile, so you must be prepared to respond quickly and adapt when things change- and they often do.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with the product and development teams to plan a documentation schedule for upcoming features.
• Write release notes and guides to accompany each release and ensure the documentation is released at the same time as new features.
• Work with the rest of the team to create any in-product user engagements and videos required to support a product release.
• Write end user documentation, including detailed how to guides, for new features aimed at users.
• Work with the product and development teams to create developer guides, including examples and API documentation, to support new developer focused releases.
• Regularly review existing product documentation to ensure that gaps in both user and developer documentation are fixed.
• Collaborate with product marketing to ensure that the documentation, including the use of terminology, is consistent with marketing materials and the Amplience website
• Work with customers, developers and partners to understand their documentation needs.
• Update documentation as required from internal and customer feedback.
• Regularly review the information architecture of the documentation site to ensure information is easy to find and agree any changes necessary.

Skills Knowledge and Expertise

• Experience writing for documentation websites.
• Experience of creating documentation for a range of audiences, from end users to developers.
• The ability to absorb technical information quickly and to explain it in a clear, concise way.
• The ability to read and understand code.
• Experience of writing API documentation and developer guides.
• Ability to multi-task, context switch and manage own your work to deadline.
• Well organized with a high attention to detail.

Additional skills (good to have):

• Knowledge of web development and JavaScript frameworks such as React, Vue or Svelte. Experience of developing or documenting code in other languages such as Java, Swift or C# would also be useful.
• Understanding of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud (Hyrbris) or similar ecommerce tools.
• Experience writing documentation for Software as a service (SaaS) products.

The Primary Tools for this role are:

• Markdown. This is used with static site builder tools to build the documentation site. Markdown can be viewed and edited in most text editors.
• GitHub/ Bitbucket for documentation version control.
• Experience with Photoshop, PowerPoint and other tools for creating images would be useful.
• Visual Studio Code (or similar) for creating code examples.
• Experience of Final Cut Pro or similar video editing tools would be useful, but not essential.

Benefits

So what’s in it for you? Aside from using some great technologies and working with smart friendly people who are very generous with their knowledge, we have a great set of benefits to recognise everybody’s individual needs.

• Freedom to work from home, with offices for when you want them
• Competitive salary
• Flexible working arrangements
• Discretionary bonus scheme
• Company pension scheme
• Employee share options so that everyone can benefit from our success
• Enhanced maternity & paternity policies
• Extra holidays once you’ve been with us for a while
• The option to purchase additional holidays
• Charity / volunteer days
• Life assurance policy
• Ride to work scheme
• Season ticket advance loans
• Study leave