Update: I’m excited to say that we’ve now hired a (great!) technical writer, so the position is closed.
Jane Street is looking to hire a technical writer.
We’ve always believed that developers should spend time and effort documenting their own code, but at the same time, a great writer with a feel for the technology can raise the level of quality in a way that few developers can. And as we’ve grown, having someone dedicated to writing makes a ton of sense.
Here are the kinds of things we’d like to have a technical writer work on:
- Training material. We have a training program that many new hires go through, including most new developers and all new traders. In that program, they learn about OCaml, our base libraries, our build system, the UNIX shell, Emacs, and our dev tools. Part of the job would be to help make the course better, both by improving what we have, and by adding new material.
- Improving library documentation. While we expect developers to do a reasonable job of documenting their code, our most important libraries deserve the time and care to make them really shine. This is aimed both internally and externally, since a lot of these libraries, like Async, Core and Incremental, are open source.
- Writing longer pieces. We need more tutorials and overviews on a variety of topics. Part of the work would be to create great new documentation, and part of it is to serve as an example for others as to what good documentation looks like. And where possible, we want to do this so that the documentation effectively compiles against our current APIs, preventing it from just drifting out of date.
In terms of skills, we want someone who is both a clear and effective written communicator, and who is good enough at programming to navigate our codebase, work through our tutorials, and write up examples. An interest in functional programming and expressive type systems is a plus, but you don’t need to know any OCaml (the language we use). That’s something we’re happy to teach you here.
