Lead Technical Writer (Network Security)

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

FLEXWORK is an employee-centric reimagining of how we work. We built FLEXWORK based on employee feedback – it is about flexibility, trust, and choice whenever possible. It’s been a journey of disruption that has yielded the best of our values. We offer as much flexibility as possible, and choices that enable you to be most productive, including benefits that meet your needs and learning opportunities that you feel passionate about.

Our Approach to Work

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work from the office three days per week, leaving two days for choice and flexibility to work where you feel most effective. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. While details may evolve, our goal is to create an environment where innovation thrives, with office-based teams coming together three days a week to collaborate and thrive, together!

Job Description

Your Career

The Palo Alto Networks TechDocs team directly helps our customers improve their security posture to best protect against cyber threats. As a part of the R&D organization, we work hands-on with products throughout the development cycle to serve as the voice of our users and to identify best practice workflows. In this role specifically, you’ll get to focus on helping companies secure their remote workforces. You’ll collaborate with product management, engineering, UX, and QA teams as you write content that helps users understand the risks their organizations face, and how secure their employees are, no matter where they are.

Your Impact

• Facility with technology—You’re curious, like to be hands-on with the products, and you can empathize with the challenges our customers face
• Organization—You can architect content so that users can easily find what they need when they need it - You can effectively track and coordinate multiple projects across the team - You’re able to anticipate what’s next and are thinking about how we can meet our users’ needs not only today, but tomorrow as well
• Initiative—You’re not afraid to propose changes to improve process and quality to enable a better customer experience and you are relentless in hunting down the information you need
• Interpersonal skills—You are able to work with developers, QA, PMs, customers, SEs, Support, and within the TechDocs team to successfully gather information required to understand the problems our users are facing and the ways our products help to solve them
• Problem solving skills—You have strong critical-thinking skills and use them to ensure that you are providing just the information our users need to complete the task at hand
• Transparent communicator—When tracking and coordinating projects, you communicate project goals, dependencies, and deadlines to all stakeholders - You like to make sure that everyone is working with the same information, you work towards building consensus, and you set expectations effectively - You seek and are comfortable receiving different viewpoints and feedback, and you’re thoughtful in pushing back or adapting

Qualifications

Your Experience

We’re looking for a seasoned technical writer with a proven track record of creating information experiences that simplify the user’s experience with the product—whether it’s writing topic-based documentation, creating in-product walkthroughs, or fine-tuning the UI copy to make the product as easy to use as possible. 

• Experience writing about network security, VPNs, or secure access service edge (SASE) products preferred - It’s great if you have experience with the tools that we use to get our work done, including
• Source control tools (Gitlab)
• Topic-based authoring tools (DITA or XML authoring; Oxygen experience preferred)
• Video tutorial creation tools (Videate)
• Team collaboration and release tracking tools (Confluence and Jira)
• Digital Adoption Platforms (Pendo)
• API documentation tools (Swagger/OpenAPI)

Education

• BA/BS or equivalent experience or equivalent military experience required 
• We’d love to see writing samples, especially concepts, and tasks written from scratch or videos you’ve created

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