For our client, an international leader in the data streaming market, we are currently seeking a freelance technical author for a salaried role at their headquarters in central London.

About the client

They are an engineering company at their heart. They bring experience and technology skills across infrastructure, security, and distributed systems. Their audience ranges from software engineers to CIOs.

Working in the Developer Relations team, you will work in a team that is small enough to be truly agile, delivering APIs that power some of the biggest tech, businesses and consumer brands in the world.

You’ll be part of a successful, highly motivated, and extremely collaborative team. They hire people who are ready and capable of taking on challenging problems in a high-growth environment. They support and maintain an environment of inclusive people who treat each other well.

Their values

Ownership and impact of work. You have real autonomy and ownership over your work with a visible impact inside the company, and externally on products that you use in your daily life.
An environment to thrive. Modern, comfy office in the heart of central London. Excellent transport links, lots of great food, bars and restaurants nearby, and multiple workspaces to match your working style.
Truly flexible working and not just lip service. We like people to be in the office most of the time, but work should also fit around life and individual ways of working so you’re free to mould hours and environment to your needs.

Work is varied and challenging as we’re solving hard, complex problems that push the limits of what’s possible with today’s software and infrastructure.

Job Requirements

As a freelance technical author, you will take complex information and communicate it clearly, concisely and accurately without relying on technical jargon.

You will be the key communications link between our engineers, marketing team, developer advocates and our developer customers.

• You will manage many projects, such as:
• Reading and writing example code
• Reviewing third-party technical content
• Updating FAQs and UX interfaces
• API documentation and tutorials
• Supporting product launches

In addition, you will write technical articles for the blog about data streaming, software infrastructure, and software design for expert software developers.

About you

You are passionate about

• Web technologies, RESTful APIs, coding — and teaching others about them.
• Best practice and creating documentation that helps customers to make optimal decision to achieve their requirements.
• Analysing documentation use, support data, and user feedback for continuous improvement, informing the documentation roadmap.
• Writing code, working with APIs, and building prototypes with developers.
• Developers’ experience and find it rewarding to positively influence how quickly they can learn concepts and features to build apps and services.
• Pitching your own ideas that deep dive into existing technologies, explore new technologies, or simply are interesting to our developer community.

Required job skills

• Can maintain, develop, and improve sites. You should be comfortable enough in code to be able to create, edit, and test documentation-related websites.
• Ability to create prototype implementations (including lightweight API integrations) to test documentation accuracy and effectiveness.
• Aptitude for organizing information and clearly describing complex business workflow, data management, and Internet networking concepts.
• Strong experience as a technical writer, preferably documenting cloud-based software products and/or APIs.
• Proven track record of understanding the challenges of keeping documentation up-to-date with improvements in fast-changing environments within a code-in-development environment, and how to write enough documentation to be helpful without overloading the reader.
• Ability to build strong working relationships with and work in cooperation with the Product, Engineering, and Customer Success teams.
• Experience of producing training and learning materials that help developers understand how to use an API product.
• Proficiency in Javascript, and ideally one other widely used general-purpose programming language (Javascript, Python, Java, Ruby, etc.).
• Comfortable with HTML, CSS and Markdown.
• Ability to work across company departments as well as in a team
• Strong project management and organisational skills, able to manage multiple online projects in a fast-paced, deadline driven environment.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience managing your own documentation projects.
• Working knowledge of Swagger, Markdown, Textile and Github or other code repositories.
• Familiarity with web standards, APIs, and other Internet technologies.
• A good understanding of realtime technologies, pub/sub, event-driven architectures or streaming services.
• Ability to work well independently and in a collaborative team environment.
• Know the SaaS and API business model and have experience documenting solutions for developers.
• Have a technical background and/or demonstrated fluency in distributed computing systems or other technical concepts relevant to our work.

What’s on offer

• A good, competitive salary
• Flexibility: work from home for up to two days per week
• Health insurance
• ClassPass membership
• Cycle to work
• Regular company away days and social events
• Weekly team breakfast or lunch
• Free drinks and snacks in the office
• On-going professional development (training, events, conferences), including an assigned budget
• 25 days of paid annual leave (33 days including bank holidays)
• Company contributions towards your pension
• Your choice of high-quality tech kit to work on

To apply, send your CV and a covering letter to recruit@firehead.net