Technical Writer

Technical Writer

at Sourcegraph (View all jobs)

Remote

ALL SOURCEGRAPH ROLES ARE FULLY REMOTE

Who we are

Our mission at Sourcegraph is to make it so that everyone can code, not just ~0.1% of the population. Our code intelligence platform helps developers and companies with billions of lines of code create the software you use every day. By enabling more people to code, we believe we will create economic opportunity across the world and will drive progress that benefits everyone.

It’s an exciting time to join Sourcegraph. Our business is growing rapidly: we’ve experienced exponential growth and our $125M Series D from Andreessen Horowitz and $50M Series C from Sequoia have given us the opportunity to make big ambitious bets on our future. We have a huge market (every company that builds software) and massive opportunity (most developers haven’t even heard of code intelligence yet, but once you’ve used it, you can’t live without it–just like Google). By continuing to hire exceptional people, we have the opportunity to make Sourcegraph one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

Working hours

Given that we are an all-remote company and hire almost anywhere in the world, we don’t have a particular time-zone preference for this role.

Why this job is exciting

Sourcegraph has product market fit thanks to a suite of features that is convincing the largest companies in the world to become customers, but we have a lot of work to do . This job offers the opportunity to help spread awareness and adoption of one of the most important developer tools on the planet. You’ll have the chance to collaborate with many teams throughout the company to deliver content that ties the platform together and improves our overall offering.

Our internal developers are customer-focused and understand and respect the power of good documentation. Our customers love our product and rely on it daily to ship and deploy better software. You’ll be buoyed and challenged by their constant stream of thoughtful feedback and engage with them to help solve their toughest problems.

We are looking for a Technical Editor to work on our documentation, blog, and other writing. You need to be comfortable tackling technical topics and excited about working with engineers, product managers, and other subject matter experts to shape and tell their stories.

You’ll be writing primarily for developers, both to help them use Sourcegraph and to persuade them to start using Sourcegraph. You need to be able to understand, use, and run Sourcegraph self-hosted, not just take concepts explained by others and reword them into docs. You should understand all of the concepts mentioned in our existing docs, or have a strong base of programming and system knowledge so you can learn about them.

Responsibilities:

• The content on https://docs.sourcegraph.com (which will be written by a combination of you and the devs/PMs who own the various product areas).
  • Run and update code snippets and config snippets in docs
  • Provide key metrics such as: # of times our support team can answer a question with a docs link, # of times that a doc page is reported as out of date or incorrect
• Blog posts at https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog (some of which you’ll write, and some of which you’ll edit after they are drafted by another team member).
  • Provide key metrics such as: # of conversions from blog to downloads of Sourcegraph App
• Helping ensure any other copy we publish is precise and on-brand

Within 30 days, you will

• Learn about our business, product, vision, and team, and gain an understanding of how your role fits into Sourcegraph’s broader organization
• Learn and understand our development process for feature releases and inter-team communication
• Use Sourcegraph self-hosted to be comfortable explaining our product and its benefits.
• Be actively updating our docs and contributing to the blog.
• Learn about our product, audience, and important themes and topics
• Meet with your peers on the marketing, product, and engineering teams and make connections with subject matter experts from across the company.

Within 90 days, you will

• Optimize content for search.
• Manage multiple content pieces spanning different formats, themes, and timelines.
• Contribute content ideas and know who to go to for what.
• Report top-performing content and share insights for future content development
• Integrate into the product/engineering sprint planning to develop a reliable process for sourcing engineering content internally
• Work with the Marketing team to improve its processes, contribute to design critiques, and build team cohesion

Within six months, you will

• Act as a leader on the editorial team and propose new content programs
• Manage multiple freelance writers and/or freelance writing agencies
• Report on content performance and insights gleaned from the data

About you

You are a talented and technical Content Marketing strategist and writer. You have a coding background and have moved into writing and marketing, or are looking to shift into a marketing role. You can create content strategies, produce high-quality technical content that connects with developers.

You will be doing a lot of writing in this job, and we’d like you to start writing and make PRs to the docs repo on Day 1. This is not a “strategy and architecture” role where you lean on other team members to do all of the writing, though we’d love you to work with Marketing and other teams for strategic planning.

Your skill-set:

• Previous work experience as a technical writer or editor
• Background in developer marketing or software engineering
• Technically proficient, can write code and are familiar with the Sourcegraph product.
• Excels at communicating with writers of all skill levels
• Self-directed and comfortable working independently
• Agile and able to learn new technologies

Nice to haves:

• You’re able to write for our enterprise buyers: leaders of platform/infra and security eng teams, and the CTO or VP Engineering.

Level

This job is an IC3. You can read more about our job leveling philosophy in our Handbook.

Compensation

We pay you an above-average salary because we want to hire the best people who are fully focused on helping Sourcegraph succeed, not worried about paying bills. You will have the flexibility to work and live anywhere in the world (unless specified otherwise in the job description), and we’ll never take your location or current/past salary information into account when determining your compensation. As an open and transparent company that values equitable and competitive compensation for everyone, our compensation ranges are visible to every single Sourcegraph Teammate. To determine your salary, we use a number of market and data-driven salary sources and target the high-end of the range, ensuring that we’re always paying above market regardless of where you live in the world.

In addition to our cash compensation, we offer equity (because when we succeed as a company, we want you to succeed, too) and generous perks & benefits.

Interview process

Below is the interview process you can expect for this role (you can read more about the types of interviews in our Handbook). It may look like a lot of steps, but rest assured that we move quickly and the steps are designed to help you get the information needed to determine if we’re the right fit for you Interviewing is a two-way street, after all!

We expect the interview process to take 5.5 hours in total.

Introduction Stage – we have initial conversations to get to know you better

• Submit 3 relevant writing samples
• [30m] Recruiter Screen
• [30m] Hiring Manager Screen with Amie Rotherham, Director of Global Communications

Team Interview Stage – we then delve into your experience in more depth and introduce you to members of the team

• [60m] Resume Deep Dive with Amie Rotherham, Director of Global Communications
• [45m] Working session
• [45m] Technical Interview
• [45m] Cross-functional collaboration with members from our product & engineering team

Final Interview Stage – we move you to our final round, where you meet cross-functional partners and gain a better understanding of our business and values holistically

• [30m] Values Interview with Jamie Lindsay, Sales Enablement and Connor O’Brien, Chief of Staff to the CEO
• [30m] Leadership Interview with Quinn Slack, CEO
• We check references and conduct your background check

Please note – you are welcome to request additional conversations with anyone you would like to meet, but didn’t get to meet during the interview process.

Not sure if this is you?

We want a diverse, global team, with a broad range of experience and perspectives. If this job sounds great, but you’re not sure if you qualify, apply anyway! We carefully consider every application, and will either move forward with you, find another team that might be a better fit, keep in touch for future opportunities, or thank you for your time.

Learn more about us

To create a product that serves the needs of all developers, we are building a diverse all-remote team that is distributed across the world. Sourcegraph is an equal opportunity workplace; we welcome people from all backgrounds and communities.

We provide competitive compensation and practical benefits to keep you happy and healthy so that you can do your best work.

Learn more about what it is like to work at Sourcegraph by reading our handbook.

We want to ensure Sourcegraph is an environment that suits your working style and empowers you to do your best work, so we are eager to answer any questions that you have about us at any point in the interview process.