Technical Author, Canonical
Ubuntu and Canonical products
Enterprise open source solutions
Job no longer available
Enterprise open source solutions
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
1001+ employees
Company mission
Canonical's mission is to make open source software available to people everywhere.
Role
Who you are
- A technical author who's comfortable working with, reading and writing code
- Or a programmer/developer with a record of producing excellent documentation
- Software development experience in Python, JavaScript or other suitable language
- Familiar with application deployment, system operations, and infrastructure management
- Qualified with a BS/BA or equivalent in Technical Communication, English, or Computer Science
- Experienced working in a technical writing position
- Has excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to assimilate technical information rapidly from a variety of sources
- Has the character and flexibility to work in a fast-paced environment
- Familiar with command line UNIX/Linux
- Effective working in a distributed team
- Confident using Ubuntu Desktop for all of the above
- Familiar with Git or other version control systems
- Has knowledge of HTML and Markdown
- Able to travel twice a year for up to two weeks for events
What the job involves
- As a technical author, you’ll be part of an engineering team, focused on a specific Canonical product. You will lead the team effort to create and maintain documentation, including tutorials, how-to guides, reference guides and explanatory material for the product you develop. You will have a broad impact on - and responsibility for - the quality of the user experience with the product, and will contribute towards the long-term success of the project
- As the technical author on the team, you will collaborate with software developers, product managers, community members, other documentation authors, information architects, quality assurance engineers, and technical support engineers to develop clear documentation for complex technical topics
- Create materials for experienced software engineers as well as those who may be new to the product
- Use and explore the product in depth, to help discover where the documentation needs to be improved
- Create documentation including tutorials, how-to guides, reference guides and explanatory material
- Review, road-test and improve practical guides
- Update reference and explanation material in collaboration with colleagues
- Improve and correct documentation based on feedback from users and technical support
- Read design documents and specifications
- Build, install, and use pre-release software to assist in generating proper instructions
- Standardise the structure, presentation, style and language of content across products
- Actively improve documentation, through attention to practice, process, tools and users’ needs
Otta's take
Theo Margolius
COO of Otta
Canonical originally started as a company to help distribute Ubuntu (an operating system based on Linux). It is now a leader in delivering open source to the world quickly, securely and cost effectively.
With a community of 200,000, Canonical publishes an operating system which runs from the tiny connected devices up to the world's biggest mainframes, the platform that everybody uses on the public cloud, and the workstation experience of the world's most productive developers. Just some of its partners include Microsoft, HP, Dell, aws, and Intel.
The founder has highlighted that Canonical's biggest challenge has been that demand is bigger than the company’s ability to service it. Originally a not-for-profit, Canonical is now monetising and is planning to go public. It also announced its product Ubuntu has a comprehensive subscription version called Ubuntu Pro, likely to aid monetising efforts.
Insights
Many candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
18% female employees
19% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Aug 2013
$9.8m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $9.8m
Company benefits
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Learning and personal professional development budget
- Annual compensation review
- Recognition rewards
- Annual leave
- Generous parental leave
- Priority Pass for travel
Company values
- Truly distributed: Exceptional, self-motivated, organised and passionate people deserve the freedom to live where they want. Our teams travel regularly to meet colleagues and customers.
- Best in class: We rate top for Linux security. We run more hosts, more workloads and more devices than anybody else, because we strive to do everything insightfully, properly, fairly, and openly
- Enterprise focused: The world is moving to Ubuntu – open source that's faster, cheaper and better. Empower engineers, secure precious data, share knowledge and lead the change
Company HQ
Southwark, London
Founders
Mark Shuttleworth
(CEO)Serial entrepreneur. Previously founded Thawte Consulting (sold to VeriSign for $575m)
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