Technical Writer - Developer Docs

We’re Fly.io, and we’re building a new public cloud. We transmogrify containers into lightweight VMs and run them on our hardware around the world – hundreds of thousands of applications rely on us, running on every continent except Antarctica. If you haven’t already, take us for spin. Your app will be up and running in just minutes.

Everyone at Fly.io writes. We write a lot because we work asynchronously and writing things down is at the core of how we do that so effectively. But documentation, as Kurt is finally coming to appreciate, is its own special kind of writing.

We don’t make it easy to build documentation here, but we do make it interesting.

Fly.io has an idiosyncratic culture. We don’t do traditional product management. Our product engineering team is divided into many 2-4 person teams, each responsible for their own roadmap, and each chartered to independently build powerful cloud primitives, which our customers use in creative ways.

Our documentation site is practically the first place in our process where all these primitives come together to tell a story about how to ship new kinds of apps (along with all the beloved classics) on our platform. It’s an unusually visible and influential place in which to do technical writing, and we’re interested in talking to the kind of person who finds that opportunity appealing.

What you’ll be doing:

• Bridging between our users, the best and most interesting community of developers on the Internet, and our product engineering team (also the best and most interesting community of developers on the Internet) by problem-solving ways to showcase our work and make it comprehensible. You know, doc-writing stuff.
• Driving forward docs projects yourself: You’ll generally be self-directed, but you’ll also have VIP backstage access to Fly.io developers to ask lots of questions and get feedback on your work.
• Working directly with Fly.io product engineers to help them deliver strong documentation on their own, helping to develop a contribution culture.
• Working with Fly.io’s design team to win the ruthless competitive power-walking race between us and other big API companies to have the coolest looking and most useful API documentation.
• Helping to make flyctl (our CLI) --help even more helpful; flyctl is the primary way of interacting with the Fly.io platform for thousands of devs.

This role will be a good fit for you if:

• You’re curious about how things work, and know how to find out by asking good questions, doing research, and trying features out for yourself.
• You write excellent English in an informal style, and can organize information to create coherent documentation that includes all—and only—the relevant details for the user.
• Your approach to editing is collaborative and focused on imparting our style wisdom over time. You can prioritize changes and are flexible when applying style guidance. At the same time, you’re open to feedback on your own work.
• You can handle a project start to finish; you independently make good decisions about docs requirements.
• You have technical aptitude: you’re comfortable on the command line and can work in codebases to add docs for CLIs, APIs, and UIs.
• You’re hands-on and can learn about features by trial and error.
• You’re skilled at other kinds of writing, especially sharing ideas, progress, and problems with your colleagues.

You’ll know you’re succeeding in your job if:

• You’re demonstrating that you understand the problems devs face managing apps on a public cloud by creating lots of docs to share that knowledge.
• You’re also still learning new things about what people can do with Fly.io, and you’re excited to share those things with users every day.
• The Fly.io devs you work with know what’s needed to create complete docs, and are reaching out or creating docs PRs when docs need updating.
• Our Support team is fielding fewer questions about how to use us, and have a handy doc to point to when a customer does ask.
• You’re taking valuable information posted in our community forum about how the platform works, and patterns to use it, and turning it into docs.

Our workflow and tools

Our public writing—that’s docs and articles—is written in markdown and goes through Sitepress, a static site generator. We publish by merging a pull request in GitHub. Our docs are in a public GitHub repo, so you can snoop if you want!

We ask questions and have discussions on Discourse (we’re big on async communication), and work on drafts in Slab when we’re collaborating.

More details

This is a mid-level, fully-remote, full-time position.

To optimize for pay equity, Fly.io doesn’t negotiate salaries. We have standardized salaries for each employee level. The salary for this role is $134k USD. We offer competitive equity grants with a long exercise window. US employees get health care, everyone gets flexible vacation time (with a minimum), hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff.

Our hiring process may be a little different from what you’re used to. We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent. So instead of resumes and interviews, we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it, with “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet. (We’re happy to talk, though!)

If you’re interested, mail [email protected]. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like. Please also include 1) your GitHub username, and 2) a sentence about a company you think has great developer documentation (so that we know you’re not a bot).