Documentation - Search - Principal Technical Writer

Elastic is an open source search company that powers enterprise search, observability, and security solutions built on one technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. From finding documents to monitoring infrastructure to hunting for threats, Elastic makes data usable in real time and at scale. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Barclays, Cisco, eBay, Fairfax, ING, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. Founded in 2012, Elastic is a distributed company with Elasticians around the globe. Learn more at elastic.co

We are seeking a technically savvy writer who can guide developers through usage of Elasticsearch, including its API, query languages, programming language clients, and data and ML integrations. You’ll be working on docs for some of Elastic’s flagship products, including Elasticsearch and our hosted Elasticsearch services.

Does this sound like the job for you? Check out our docs, install and tinker with the products that interest you, and think about where you might fit in. Then, show us your writing chops. Tell us why you're interested and what you can bring to the role. Upload relevant writing samples, or provide links to your portfolio, GitHub contributions, or other publicly available content with your application.

What You’ll Do:

• Design and author technical content, often in collaboration with engineers, product, managers, and other writers and stakeholders
• Contribute to our team’s standards, tools, and best practices for creating content
• Write ”docs as code”, following Elastic’s Git-based software development process
• Help engineers and other docs contributors succeed within our publishing system
• Review and edit documentation changes contributed by other Elastic employees and community members
• Identify areas for improvement, and redesign or refactor existing content
• Use Elastic products and develop empathy for our customers
• Collaborate with other content creators at Elastic from Engineering, Marketing, Design, Support, and beyond, to help tell a consistent Elastic story

What You Bring:

• Proven experience writing technical content for a developer audience
• Familiarity with various documentation types (for example: tutorial, guide, reference)
• Comfort with Markdown, Git, and GitHub–experience with a “docs as code” workflow
• Ability and desire to work in a fully distributed environment
• An understanding of software development teams and workflows
• Proven experience managing your daily work and projects with little oversight
• Ability to work with stakeholders and set priorities for your coverage area

Bonus Points:

• Experience with software development, scripting, command line tools, and APIs
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch and its APIs and query languages
• Familiarity with application development and data integrations

Members of our docs team help shape the evolution of our products and services. We care deeply about giving you ownership of what you’re working on. We believe Elastic achieves greatness when you are free to pursue your ideas and are surrounded and challenged by your peers. You are encouraged to comment on anything, regardless of your role.

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Double your charitable giving - We match up to $1500 (or local currency equivalent)
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is committed to diversity as well as inclusion. We are an equal opportunity employer and committed to the principles of affirmative action. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to rac