Staff Technical Writer

Job Description

The team at Lightstep is making software more reliable, predictable, and dependable. Lightstep enables teams to detect and resolve regressions quickly, regardless of system scale or complexity. We integrate seamlessly into daily workflows, helping teams whether they are proactively optimizing performance or investigating a root cause, so they can quickly get back to building features.

Lightstep is looking for a Staff Technical Writer to help educate our developer users with content that helps them do their job efficiently, without getting in the way. We are seeking people who are as passionate about the customer experience as they are about words and the process of delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. As part of the Design team, you’ll be all-in on delivering a world-class user experience.

About the design team

Lightstep technical writers report into the Product Design team, and it’s small and mighty! The team has several years of experience in the observability space and a love for information design problems. We turn complex technical workflows into delightful, effective experiences that help developers solve real problems. We strive to balance pragmatism with vision in our work and process. We iterate in small cycles, getting feedback from our peers and from customers along the way.

We are a distributed team, with team members in San Francisco, Portland, Tampa, NYC, and Sedona.

What you’ll do:

• Create, edit, and maintain our product docs for developer/SRE customers
• Partner with designers on UX and microcopy content
• Work with engineers and product managers to ensure the functionality and differentiators in our product are comprehensively presented in a way that makes sense for our users, without overwhelming them
• Collaborate with team members to evolve our processes, standards, and architecture to continuously improve our product content and how it’s delivered

You would be a great addition if....

• You can explain and architect complex technical concepts in a manner a developer/SRE audience understands
• You’re passionate about the whole user experience and the part documentation plays in that
• You’re self-directed and have managed multiple documentation projects
• You can easily adapt to changes in prioritization and timelines
• You’re able to work on multiple projects at the same time and work proactively and collaboratively with cross-functional teams
• You have worked with and can understand code examples in multiple languages

Bonus points if ...

• You’ve delivered documentation in a CI/CD environment using GitHub, Markdown, and a static site generator like Jekyll.
• You have knowledge of observability and SRE practices
• You’ve worked with OpenAPI (Swagger) and are comfortable with editing code to generate API documentation
• UX copywriting experience

Lightstep, a part of ServiceNow, is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status or any other category protected by law.

All new employees hired in the United States are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, subject to such exceptions as required by law. If hired, you will be required to submit proof of full vaccination or have an approved accommodation, by your start date. Visit our Candidate FAQ page to learn more. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are limited in the ability or unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method or applying, you may contact us at [email protected] for assistance.