Overview
At GitLab, our team of technical writers is responsible for ensuring that the documentation for all of our products is clear, correct, and easy to use. We are looking for great writers with strong technical proficiencies who will help our users succeed with our rapidly evolving suite of developer tools.
You’ll collaborate with our engineers, who typically write the first draft of docs for the new features they create. You’ll dive in on special projects, authoring new content for the docs and the UI, while planning new processes, standards, and doc site features. You’ll be at the leading edge of DevOps and remote work while contributing to one of the world’s largest open-source projects and engaging with our wider community.
GitLab is an all-remote company, and this is a remote position with no geographical requirements. You will be part of a fast-growing team with members in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Responsibilities
- Continuously improve GitLab’s documentation content in collaboration with engineers, product managers, and others.
- Review and edit doc plans and content for all new and enhanced features.
- Through the use and testing of GitLab and its documentation, as well as SME interviews, proactively identify information needs and content opportunities. Develop new content to meet those needs and plan further work for the technical writing team.
- Plan and complete large content initiatives such as section reviews and overhauls.
- Help developers and other members of the community who have documentation-related questions.
- Help review and triage incoming suggestions, corrections, and other content from the community.
- Act as a primary content reviewer for other technical writers.
- Continuously improve GitLab’s documentation site features and user experience in collaboration with engineers and other technical writers. This may include the documentation site’s design, search, build process, feedback methods, SEO, visitor analytics, versioning, and other technical components.
- Plan and lead documentation site feature enhancement initiatives.
- Work with UX to identify contextual content/documentation opportunities in the product.
- Produce reports on documentation usage and metadata.
- Contribute to the improvement of team process and style, as well as cross-functional efforts.
- Act as a reviewer of release blog posts and contributor to GitLab’s Handbook.
- Make it easy for contributors from the community—internal and external—to submit quality documentation.
- Contribute to the documentation Style Guide and documentation process guides.
- Collaborate and improve upon collaborative processes with others including product managers, Support, Marketing, Engineering, and the wider GitLab community.
- Collaboration
- Mentor newly hired technical writers.
- Represent the team at hackathons or other community endeavors.
- Plan and lead a portion of the team’s process-improvement initiatives.
- Organize and prioritize portions of the team’s work backlogs.
Requirements
- You have:
- Extensive experience planning, writing, and managing software documentation.
- Excellent skills in writing, editing, research, and planning.
- Understanding of what makes documentation clear and effective.
- Great teaching skills that translate into amazing written work.
- Experience establishing processes used by teams across an organization in support of documentation.
- Experience planning and leading major initiatives such as the launch of new documentation resources, large-scale documentation reviews and overhauls, cross-functional initiatives, etc.
- Experience using data and evidenced-based decision making.
- Experience using Git on the Linux or Mac command line and developer tools and workflows.
- Experience with a docs-as-code workflow, a markup language such as Markdown, AsciiDoc, or reStructuredText, and at least one programming language (though this does not need to be from a professional context).
- You are:
- Highly organized; able to triage and prioritize numerous issues and projects.
- Able to succeed in a remote, globally distributed work environment.
- You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
You’ll receive special consideration if you have experience with:
- Developing sites using static site generators.
- Multiple DevOps tools.
- JavaScript and intermediate front-end development.
- Advanced programming or other technical experience.
Our hiring process is described in more detail in our Handbook’s Hiring section. When you apply, please include a cover letter that describes why you are interested in this position and in what ways you are well-qualified for it.
About GitLab
GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 1,000 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.
We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.
Top 10 reasons to work for GitLab:
- Work with helpful, kind, motivated, and talented people.
- Work remote so you have no commute and are free to travel and move.
- Have flexible work hours so you are there for other people and free to plan the day how you like.
- Everyone works remote, but you don’t feel remote. We don’t have a head office, so you’re not in a satellite office.
- Work on open source software so you can interact with a large community and can show your work.
- Work on a product you use every day: we drink our own wine.
- Work on a product used by lots of people that care about what you do.
- As a company we contribute more than we take, most of our work is released as the open source GitLab CE.
- Focused on results, not on long hours, so that you can have a life and don’t burn out.
- Open internal processes: know what you’re getting in to and be assured we’re thoughtful and effective.
See our culture page for more!
Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto.
Compensation
The Technical Writer job page contains the description and requirements for all levels of technical writer and the role’s compensation calculator.
Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.
