Senior Technical Writer at Wikimedia Foundation

You are responsible for:

• Ensure technical documentation is clear, accurate and up-to-date and fulfills goal of expanding and supporting the developer community
• Develop and lead on guidelines, templates, and best practices of both user-facing and developer documentation, covering topics like code documentation and contribution & collaboration guidelines
• Produce high-quality and easy-to-understand documentation for a variety of engineering projects, API documentation, FAQs, user guides, standard operating procedures, etc.
• Coordinate and work with teams and community volunteers to obtain an in-depth understanding of documentation needs and requirements
• Expand the community of writers contributing to public documentation through teaching and sharing best practices, guidelines and tutorials
• Communicate widely and frequently to a wide audience of technical volunteers and staff via mailing list, IRC, and wikis
• Share our values, respect our code of conduct, adhere to our team norms, and work in accordance with all three

Skills and Experience:

• Extensive experience in technical writing for software or infrastructure projects and creating technical documentation for developers
• Experience with software development, code documentation and/or engineering best practices
• Experience using PHP, Python, Node.js, or other languages to build web applications
• Experience writing documentation in markdown, wikitext, HTML or similar markup languages

Qualities that are important to us:

• Ability to make complex technical concepts understandable for others
• Strong verbal and written communication and presentation skills
• Strong research skills (as there will not always be developer support for some of the issues that need to be documented)
• Strong interpersonal skills, with track record of modeling good social and development practices
• Creative and highly motivated to serve diverse, multilingual and international communities
• Comfortable in a collaborative, consensus-oriented and open environment
• Comfortable using a wide variety of communication/collaboration tools including wikis, mailing lists, and IRC

Additionally, we'd love it if you have:

• Experience contributing to and participating in free and open-source software projects
• Experience in community building and outreach initiatives
• Experience with building automation for documentation
• Experience working with and writing for diverse, multilingual and international communities
• Ability to read and write multiple (human) languages