Documentation - Senior Manager, Technical Writing

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

The Documentation team drives the creation-evolution of content and documentation in order to build extraordinary user assistance for our products.

As a Documentation Team Lead for Platform, you will engage with all the teams in the Elastic platform to understand their needs as well as our target customers. You will organize, plan, and deliver documentation and technical content for our products, which are delivered as downloads for on-premises use as well as cloud solutions. Because the platform delivers core functionality for other solutions, such as Observability and Security, you will collaborate with those documentation teams to create an efficient content strategy to share and leverage content across products and solutions.

The team is diverse and distributed across the world, and collaborates daily over GitHub, Zoom, and Slack. Thus, the ability to work within a distributed team is critical. You don’t always need to be the person with the answer or the person making the decisions, but instead should be able to guide discussions to help the team make decisions together.

What you will be working on

• Manage, mentor, and lead a globally distributed team.
• Work with engineering teams to deliver content for multiple product delivery methods, including on-premise and using Elastic Cloud.
• Be a contact point in Documentation for other teams within Elastic.
• Be hands-on with the content:
• Research what our users need, write external documentation, and participate in peer reviews.
• Review and edit content generated by others for clarity and consistency.
• Collaborate with the support team, engineers, product managers, and design to provide a smooth user experience.

What you’ll bring

• Experience leading teams of technical writers.
• Experience as a hands-on technical writer with proven experience writing for a variety of audiences–developers and administrators in particular.
• A compassionate approach to communication, a good sense of humor, and a genuine interest in the success and growth of the people you work with.
• Ability to communicate well with individuals and groups to accomplish a common set of goals.
• Excellent editing and proofreading skills.
• Excellent planning, organization, and communication skills.
• Able to learn new technical concepts quickly.
• Comfortable shifting between projects and wearing a variety of hats.
• A track record of successfully working with cross-functional teams.

Bonus Skills:

• Familiarity using data visualization tools
• Experience contributing to an public project
• Working knowledge of git and GitHub
• Some programming experience

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 race, color, relig