Technical Writer, SRE-Infrastructure (Contract)

Summary

Type: Contract

Hours: max 40 hours per week* 

Duration: 3 months 

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Technical Writer to support our Site Reliability Engineering teams (SRE) and users of their self-service infrastructure, reporting to the Manager of Developer Advocacy. As the Technical Writer, you will help improve the information structure of existing SRE team documentation and their team interfaces and be responsible for reviewing, improving, and creating educational material for users of key infrastructure services. You will work closely with our SRE teams and be part of our technical writer cohort in Developer Advocacy.

You will work remotely with a full-time distributed team and need to overlap (UTC-5 to UTC+3) working hours. 

You are responsible for:

• Review and consult on the information structure of our SRE team documentation and help clarify audiences and team interfaces 
• Plan and create content for user interface text, error messages, developer documentation, and other user interfaces, following our standard review process where applicable:
• Improve existing educational material for users of our self-service infrastructure, example can be found here: Kubernetes workshop
• Develop training content that introduces participants to how we will measure service reliability with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and provide guidance for creating these measures in practice.
• Review and improve the existing templates across our team & technical documentation (example)
• Produce clear, simple boilerplate texts covering common maintenance and outage scenarios and messaging for our public facing status page, and coordinate their translation
• Produce templates for service launch and deprecation announcements

Skills and Experience:

• Demonstrated experience in technical writing for (large scale) infrastructure projects and creating technical documentation for engineers (SRE/Operations/DevOps)
• A passion for and experience in planning and organizing technical information across multiple areas and for diverse audiences
• Ability to understand complex technical concepts and make them understandable for others
• Enjoy working in a team, and have the people and communication skills to do that well
• Strong research skills

Qualities that are important to us:

• Comfortable working in a collaborative, consensus-oriented and open environment
• Open to using a wide variety of communication/collaboration tools, including wikis, Slack and Google Workspace
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Have the flexibility and openness to adopt our style, processes, and practices, but aren’t afraid to suggest improvements that benefit our teams, our collaborators, or our users.
• Disciplined to work remotely, with the ability to multitask and switch priorities 
• Clear in your written and communication skills, feeling comfortable working asynchronously
• Dependable, well organized with ability to self-start

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience contributing to and participating in free and open-source software projects
• Experience with Linux systems engineering and/or software engineering

• Experience working with and writing for diverse, multilingual and international audiences
• Experience working with SRE/Operations/DevOps
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and/or Python 
• Familiarity with MediaWiki and/or MediaWiki APIs

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at recruiting@wikimedia.org or +1 (415) 839-6885.