Lead Technical Writer

Full-time - Mid Level

San Mateo, CA

Publishing Industries

About the position

Observe is redefining how companies manage operational telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, etc.) generated by modern distributed applications. Traditional logging, monitoring, and APM tools are often too complex, leading to excessive costs and lengthy incident resolution times. Many solutions fall short because the necessary data is either too costly to retain or too cumbersome to access. Observe changes the game, offering a single observability platform for all telemetry data, built on a cloud-native data warehouse that delivers unmatched scale and cost efficiency. No filtering, no sampling-just comprehensive, uncompromised observability. As Lead Technical Writer, you would own one of the most important products in our portfolio: our documentation! We are looking for someone who would bring their passion for writing and teaching to provide a documentation experience that helps users understand our platform, onboard, and ultimately build a successful Observability practice. This role is based in San Mateo, California, but remote candidates are welcome to apply.

Responsibilities

• Serve as lead contributor and editor-in-chief of docs.observeinc.com.
• Develop user guides, reference docs, tutorials, API docs, migration guides, best practices, and FAQs for a technical audience.
• Maintain a documentation backlog and collaborate with Product Managers, Engineers, and UX Designers to ensure new features and updates are accurately reflected.
• Review and shepherd third-party contributions to docs.observeinc.com from your Engineering and Product Management peers.
• Manage a release notes process, and partner with sales and marketing to communicate major product changes to customers.
• Maintain and continuously improve the docs.observeinc.com publishing pipeline and tooling.
• Engage early in the product development cycle to ensure new features are intuitive and explainable to users.
• (Ideal candidate: Community building and engagement with a technical user group.)

Requirements

• 4+ years of full-time work experience as a technical writer or equivalent role.
• Exemplary technical writing skills. You cut quickly through jargon, write and rewrite until your meaning is crystal-clear and digestible to a wide audience.
• Prior experience with 'docs-as-code' publishing tools like Sphinx/Markdown/Read-the-Docs, and source code management tools like GitHub.
• Ability to work autonomously, be proactive, prioritize, communicate, and function in a productive team.
• (Ideal candidate: Hands-on experience with other monitoring/observability solutions, such as Grafana, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog, New Relic)
• (Ideal candidate: Proficiency in programming languages like Python or Javascript and query languages like SQL or PromQL)