Staff engineering writer
Engineering Writer (Staff level) - part time
We are looking for a Staff level engineering writer to lead writing projects. Our staff engineering writers become experts in a specific customer's product or platform, and is involved in everything from creating proof of concept systems, writing in-depth highly technical guides, understanding the customer's positioning and needs, and reviewing drafts from other writers.
We value generalist engineers who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty building different parts of a system - often a bit of everything from backend, frontend, devops, configuration, and more. You should be very comfortable learning new platforms, languages and systems as required.
You'll enjoy this role if you like working on greenfield problems - starting with a blank slate and solving a specific problem in 10-20 hours of technical work, followed by writing up a detailed guide on how you did it.
Who we are
Ritza is a technical writing agency. We create documentation, blog posts, guides, ebooks, and other technical materials, usually for software engineers. All our writers have engineering experience and they produce the materials that they would want themselves.
Although we work fully remotely, most of the team is in South Africa and we meet up in person at least once per year.
We've done work for well-known technical startups like Sentry, Replit, Sourcegraph, and many others.
Read more about what it's like writing for Ritza.
What we offer
- A globally distributed, asynchronous work environment (since before covid). We communicate mainly on Slack, with occasional Zoom calls. We follow our principles which describe in more detail our focus on crafting.
- Greenfield projects: most of our work is building proof-of-concept applications and integrations and documenting how that is done. This is often very satisfying as you can start from scratch without tech debt, and make your own decisions about structure and tooling.
- Small team: we're around 10 people with a mix of full and part-time at the moment. Join us and make your mark by helping to define how we scale.
- Flexibility: our core working hours are 9AM to 5PM SAST, and we need some overlap with these, but otherwise we offer a lot of flexibility in terms of when the work gets done.
Compared to working in corp, you'll have fewer meetings, need to deal less with legacy systems, and generally focus more on building and creating. One of our senior writers said:
Ritza made me realise why I loved coding again.
What we are looking for
You should have five or more years experience as a professional software engineer, developing software that runs in a production setting.
You should ideally have at least two years of experience in a management position, having people report to you and being responsible for their output and technical growth.
You should be able to pick up new tools, frameworks, and languages easily. This is a generalist role where you will cover full stack engineering, including frontend, backend, devops, databases, integrations, cloud, and more.
You should have some experience writing: a personal blog, technical documentation, or anything else is fine, but even better if you've pushed production documentation or technical blogs before.
You can find a summary of what we expect from our engineering writers at different levels in our career ladder.
Apply by filling out this form (note it is a generic form we use for all applications so some fields may not apply).
You should have at least 40 hours / month available with a majority during our working hours - i.e. this is not a moonlighting position that you can do while working a standard 9-5 somewhere else. We can offer positions either full time (within South Africa) or on a contract specified in hours per week.
Email gareth-at-ritza-dot-co if you have questions with 'STAFF ENGINEERING WRITER' as a subject.
[We are also hiring for several existing and future projects, so feel free to fill out the form if you’re interested in tech writing even if you’re not a perfect fit.]