Senior Technical Writer
SUB-DEPARTMENT
Product – Development
JOB TYPE
Full Time
LOCATION
Boston; Indianapolis; San Diego; Toronto; Remote United States
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Seismic, a rapidly growing Forbes Cloud 100 company, is the global leader in enablement, helping make sales teams better by becoming more productive and engaging with buyers in a compelling way. Seismic’s platform provides continuous guidance to improve behavior, content, and skills to win more deals and deliver better experiences. Nearly 2,000 organizations including IBM and American Express have made Seismic their enablement platform of choice. Seismic integrates with business-critical platforms including Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and Adobe. Seismic is headquartered in San Diego, with offices across North America, Europe, Australia and China.
Seismic is committed to building an inclusive workplace that ignites growth for our employees and creates a culture of belonging that allows all employees to be seen and valued for who they are. Learn more about DEI at Seismic here.
Technical writers play an instrumental role on Seismic’s R&D team, communicating new product releases to customers, delivering technical documentation for those releases, and keeping our documentation hub up-to-date for multiple products.
Technical documentation at Seismic has undergone a radical transformation over the last three years to support the business’s accelerating growth and rapid product innovation. We’ve adopted a new information model, transitioned to DITA, and implemented modern tools and systems. Technical writers at Seismic are members of the Technical Communications team, which has centralized governance and shared goals, tools, and processes. Technical writers are also integrated with product development teams, which allows for close collaboration and partnership with product managers, designers, and software engineers.
What you will do:
- Deliver documentation for new product features and develop content for related release communications using Oxygen/Ixiasoft, our DITA authoring/cCMS tools
- Analyze existing product documentation and update, revise, replace, and retire as needed
- Partner with assigned product managers/teams to support product documentation and release communication needs
- Track feature development for assigned product teams and ensure that all required documentation is planned, developed, tested, and delivered on schedule
- Collaborate with designers, developers, product managers, and key stakeholders to understand and meet technical enablement requirements from feature conception until launch
- Research and build holistic knowledge about our products, services, and technology
- Build relationships with experts across our business who can help you better understand our customers, empathize with their problems, and articulate how our technology helps solve them
- Engage with and support other documentation team members to help establish best practices, drive quality and consistency, and build a positive team culture
- Help implement new solutions that improve how technical information is delivered to our customers (e.g., contextual help, unified search)
- Help drive continuous improvement across our documentation set using insights from analytics and direct feedback from customers and internal users
What you will bring to the team:
- BA/BS degree in English, Technical Communication/Writing, Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or relevant professional experience (required)
- 5+ years relevant experience in Scrum/Agile development environments (required)
- Experience with DITA (preferred)
- Experience in structured authoring/topic-based help (preferred)
- Experience with Oxygen, Ixiasoft, Zoomin, or similar a plus
- Experience with UX design, HTML, CSS, and other Web technologies a plus
- Experience building foundational content strategy, infrastructure, and processes a plus
- Experience documenting APIs a plus
- Experience delivering context-sensitive help using Pendo a plus
- Experience in instructional video creation using tools such as Camtasia and Captivate a plus
- Information architecture experience a plus
- Eagerness to understand challenging technical concepts and learn new things every day
- Ability to quickly grasp complex ideas and translate them into technical content that’s accessible to audiences with mixed levels of experience
- Enthusiasm for working hands-on with the software as it is being developed
- Flexibility to juggle multiple projects and prioritize tasks in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
- Independent motivation and self-direction to be highly productive and meet deadlines without fail
- Strong interpersonal skills for communicating and collaborating with people across different time zones, teams, ranks, and disciplines
- Painstaking attention to detail and obsession with accuracy
- Impeccable oral and written English skills
- Appreciation of the challenges and ambiguity involved in documenting fast-evolving products
- Analytical skills and aptitude for troubleshooting
- Desire to problem-solve
- Ability to track issues and implement fixes from problem to resolution
What we have for you:
USA
- Take time to rest and recharge with generous time off, paid company holidays and end of year company shutdown.
- Medical, dental, vision, employer-paid life insurance and disability benefits
- Access to Health Savings Account (HSA) with $1,000 Single/$2,000 annual employer contribution
- Access to free paid telemedicine and wellness offers through medical plan
- Fertility and family planning benefits with financial assistance for adoption and surrogacy
- Paid parental leave and family caregiver leaves
- Annual professional development reimbursement
- Mental health support with 12 free counseling sessions for you and your family members
- 401k with annual employer match
- Equity program and performance-based bonuses
- Bring Your Own Device technology stipend
- Seismic Cares Program with charitable donation matching
Canada
- Take time to rest and recharge with paid time off, paid company holidays, and end of year company shutdown
- Fertility and family planning benefits with financial assistance for adoption and surrogacy
- 100% employer-paid Medical, dental, vision and 2x life insurance
- Retirement savings plan with annual employer contribution
- Equity program and performance-based bonuses
- Paid parental leave
- Access to free paid telemedicine
- Mental health support with 12 free counseling sessions for you and your family members
- Annual professional development reimbursement
- Bring Your Own Device technology stipend
- Seismic Cares Program with charitable donation matching
- Communities of Belonging (employee resource/affinity groups)
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If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable accommodation as part of the application or recruiting process, please contact us at [email protected].
Headquartered in San Diego and with employees across the globe, Seismic is the global leader in sales enablement, backed by firms such as Permira, Ameriprise Financial, EDBI, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and T. Rowe Price. Seismic also recently expanded its team and product portfolio with the acquisition of Percolate, Grapevine6, and Lessonly. Our board of directors is composed of several industry luminaries including John Thompson, former Chairman of the Board for Microsoft.
Seismic is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender, age, race, religion, or any other classification which is protected by applicable law.
Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.