Observe is building an Observability Cloud that allows customers to bring their machine data (logs, metrics, traces, etc.) together in one place, and then structures that data so it is correlated and easy to navigate. The platform is built on top of a cloud data warehouse platform (Snowflake). Traditional approaches to this problem have resulted in fragmented tooling and fragile dashboards which, in turn, have resulted in exploding costs and complexity. At Observe, we believe that the core challenge lies in organizing and relating telemetry data emitted by those applications, despite the fact it is constantly changing. Solving this data problem makes observability an order of magnitude easier, faster, and less expensive. At Observe, we didn’t set out to build another monitoring tool company, we set out to build a data company. Our mission is to become the leader in the $20B+ market for Observability. Observe is founded by a top enterprise, VC Sutter Hill Ventures, and has a founding team from leading Enterprise SaaS companies Snowflake, Splunk, and Wavefront.
We’re growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Observe.
As a Principal Technical Writer, you bring your in-depth experience and extensive skill set to provide product documentation that presents complex concepts and instructions in easy to understand language to guide our customers through their Observe journey.
Observe is located in San Mateo, California. Local candidates are preferred for this role.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Create online guides, reference docs, and tutorials for technical audiences, including Site Reliability Engineers, Software Engineers, and Engineering Leaders.
- Engage directly with product managers, software engineers, and UI designers to ensure all features, enhancements, and changes are fully documented.
- Work with release engineers and dev ops to deliver weekly product updates and documentation.
- Interact with sales and data engineers to help drive customer engagement and adoption, which may include:
- Editing technical blog posts.
- Developing implementation guides, migration guides, best practices, and FAQs.
REQUIRED SKILLS/EXPERIENCE:
- 10+ years creating technical product documentation from scratch, as well as from specs.
- Demonstrates technical curiosity, and is fascinated by software technology and its challenges.
- Ability to work autonomously, be proactive, prioritize, communicate, and function in a productive team.
- Comfortable taking on long-term, complex technical writing projects in a self-directed manner.
- Strong SQL and other database skills such as queries using Redshift, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or other databases, and comfortable working with sample code.
- Exposure to using and documenting any of the following technologies:
- Host monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Fluentbit, etc.
- Application monitoring tools such as OpenTelemetry, and others
- Cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, etc.
- Additional topics including metrics, data ingestion, and data modeling
- In-depth knowledge of the content development lifecycle, including:
- Identifying and understanding the information needs of the audience.
- Gathering information, interviewing SMEs, and conducting research.
- Authoring, publishing, and managing online content.
ADDITIONAL DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Community building and engagement with a technical user group
- Familiarity with:
- Programming languages/APIs using Python, Terraform, Go, C#/.NET, etc.
- Experience with the following writing tools:
- Open-source platforms and authoring/publishing tools for a "Docs-as-Code" approach including GitHub, RST/Sphinx, Markdown, HTML, etc.
Observe's mission is to turn business data into information. Our SaaS Observability product ingests anything with a timestamp - logs, metrics, traces - and then curates and relates that data to provide unique insights into a customer’s data universe. If a customer has a problem on the application layer, engineering teams can seamlessly find the root cause of the issue whether that’s a new release pushed to production from Jenkins, or an underlying database or memory issue. We enable engineers to spend more time coding features and less time investigating incidents. We reduce outages and issues with customer experience. And we leverage an elastic cloud architecture so that customers only pay for what they use. To learn more about Observe, visit www.observeinc.com or join the conversation on Twitter @Observe_Inc.
Observe Inc. is a diversity-friendly zone. We seek to assemble a heterogeneous team where employees from all backgrounds can feel valued, appreciated, and celebrated, and where individual development does not come second to our collective goals.
