Lead Technical Writer

About us

We're an early stage, well-funded startup team with a proven track record of shipping open source software with global adoption. We put a premium on respectful, clear, and complete communication, and we expect each other to be creative, curious, effective, and empathetic.

We believe deeply that the right tools and abstractions enable not just technological transformation, but also organizational transformation. We strive to put the user and their hard work at the center of our decision making. In practice, that means we are looking for engineers who want to write clean APIs and helpful error messages, and who always try to understand user needs when designing a new system.

All of our open source work is done publicly. You can gain context about how we collaborate as a team and the problems we work on by exploring GitHub and looking at our code reviews.

About the role

Dagster is seeking an experienced Lead Technical Writer to join our Community Engineering team and elevate our documentation efforts. In this role, you'll be responsible for creating, maintaining, and improving our technical documentation using a docs-as-code approach with Docusaurus.

You'll play a critical role in helping make our features easier to understand, by owning all our user-facing documentation. This is a technical position within the Community Engineering team at Dagster.

This is a full-time, competitively paid position with benefits. We are a distributed team with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis. We have team members all over the U.S. and we are hiring fully remote candidates in the U.S. Every employee is provided a remote work stipend to cover the cost of home office equipment and anything else that makes your remote work location comfortable, productive, or successful. And if you'd rather not work from home, we'll cover the cost of a coworking or office space if you're fully remote.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the development and maintenance of Dagster's technical documentation, including API references, user guides, tutorials, and conceptual overviews.
• Collaborate closely with engineering teams to understand new features and translate complex technical information into clear, concise documentation.
• Project managing developer documentation initiatives from concept to launch, collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Maintain a docs-as-code workflow, leveraging Git, GitHub, and Docusaurus.
• Develop and enforce documentation standards and best practices across the organization.
• Mentor and guide contributors to ensure high-quality documentation.
• Analyze and improve the information architecture of our documentation site.
• Create and maintain templates and style guides for consistent documentation.
• Participate in the open-source community and manage contributions to our documentation.

Must-have Qualifications

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.

• 5+ years of experience as a technical writer, with at least 2 years in a lead role.
• Excellent writing and editing skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Experience documenting APIs, SDKs, and developer tools.
• Experience with the docs-as-code framework such as issue tracking, version control, restructured text and markdown and static site generators such as Docusaurus
• Ability to work independently and lead documentation initiatives while effectively managing multiple, complex efforts simultaneously, such as the launch of new documentation resources, large-scale documentation audits, and cross-functional initiatives.

Nice-to-have Qualifications

• Solid understanding of Python and Git, and GitHub
• Familiarity with docs-as-code workflows and static site generators, particularly Docusaurus.
• Familiarity with data engineering, data pipelines, or similar technical domains.
• Passing familiarity with React, CSS, and web development
• Previous experience in data tools or open-source company.

You belong here

We are committed to building an inclusive team and an open-source community where no one feels out of place. We know that teams with diverse backgrounds state their assumptions more explicitly, think more rigorously, and build better software. Plus it's more fun and interesting to work with a wide variety of perspectives.

You should apply to work at Dagster Labs if you want to work in, and help to build and strengthen, a high-performing software development environment where people of all backgrounds are welcome.

Our Stack

Dagster is built in Python and TypeScript to work on macOS, Posix, and Windows. We use GraphQL, Apollo, and React to develop beautiful frontend tooling. We integrate with a wide range of databases, data warehouses, orchestration engines, compute substrates, and cloud services.

The estimated annual cash salary for this role is $140,000 - $190,000.

Other resources:

• The launch of Dagster blog post
• Launching Dagster Cloud to GA blog post
• Dagster Day 2022 video playlist
• Our latest major release
• Software-Defined Assets blog post, Data Council talk, and animated explainer
• Our latest episode on the Data Engineering Podcast
• Our philosophy on code reviews