About the job
We’re on the hunt for problem solvers, thinkers, and idealists who are looking for anything but business as usual. You’re a high achiever like us, an expert at your profession and always pushing the boundaries. You believe in being inclusive and want to be part of a culture that encourages you to be your true self. You know that winning depends on dedication, that our differences are what make us stronger, and that the finish line is always sweeter when the entire team crosses as one.
Our Global Content team posts help documentation for all of our products on related sites. Our website is the official technical documentation website for Alteryx. It contains 8 languages, has over half a million visits per month, and contains over 20 GB of content. It’s a static site constructed using Paligo CMS and hosted in AWS.
Our ideal candidate is a technical writer looking to advance their skills in web management, or a web professional looking to enter the tech writing field.
This team member will be our expert on all-things web. They will ensure optimal technologies and processes to create the best user experience. Their website manager efforts enhance the user experience and site responsiveness as well as suggesting improvements for SEO, site maps, robots.txt, redirects, etc. They will also work with our IT and Information Security teams to ensure compliance and implement best practices.
On the tech writing end, we will rework the projects and duties so the workload balances with the web manager tasks. This colleague may claim ownership of documentation on smaller product sets, products with infrequent releases, special-purpose projects, or support other technical writers on minor updates and release work. We anticipate the tech writing load varying, particularly when we near release time, have significant features in the works, or custom documentation projects.
What You Will Own and Enhance
- Branding, Localization, and Accessibility— You are the team’s sole specialist in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, and will leverage these abilities to personalize the look and feel of our site, in addition to language and accessibility features. The CMS offers an out-of-the-box style. You will leverage your expertise to make it applicable to us. You generate ideas, execute them, and track results. Your work enhances the global user experience.
- Web performance and availability—You keep an eye on our site and determine where actions are needed. You discover areas to improve, and you create and roll out fixes. For things that need external help, you work with vendors and IT. You detect risks, eliminate blockers, and handle stakeholder technical communications for things that pertain to our web performance and security. A work well done is that the site runs flawlessly, sev-1 problems are fixed within 24 hours, and sev-2 problems within 48.
- AWS Well Architected Framework—The technical writing group has ownership of the site’s information architecture. You have responsibility for developing and executing best practices from the AWS Well Architected Framework for our 20+ GB of content that we keep in S3.
- Ranking, Crawling, and Indexing—You apply best practices to sitemaps, robots, and any other files so that only appropriate information is being indexed and displayed back in search results.
- Google Analytics—You love working with and analyzing data from Google Analytics. This is a team effort where the Tech Writing and Localization team contribute inputs and ideas and work together on the design and implementation.
- Custom scripting—Our website depends on JavaScript to execute some tasks, along with a custom script for giving search results to API requests from our brand products. You will have ownership of and maintain custom scripts or work with our vendor in the maintenance and development of current scripts.
- Technical Documentation—Depending on your experience in tech writing, you will own product documentation sets, develop ad-hoc documentation, or assist the technical writers with documentation updates. We will refine your tech writing assignments as necessary to allow you to accommodate web management tasks without becoming overwhelmed with work. As improvements are made to the website and more bandwidth opens up, we’ll add more tech writing projects or documentation ownership for more products.
What You Already Know
- You hold a bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience) in a relevant field to this position.
- You possess a natural curiosity and can acquire technical subjects independently.
- You are enthusiastic about online technical documentation. You either possess 2 years of technical writing experience for software products, or you are a seasoned web manager who wants to learn and grow in the area of technical writing.
- You possess a minimum of intermediate level skills in CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript, with a portfolio to demonstrate your level of skill.
- You possess one year of full-time experience as the web developer or admin for large sites hosted in AWS with S3, EC2, CloudFront, and Route53. Alternatively, you can substitute this requirement with formal education in AWS or an associate-level AWS certification, and a portfolio of sites you have hosted in AWS (please put a link to your portfolio in your resume).
- You have a clear understanding of how sites are constructed and optimized for localization and accessibility.
- You are an excellent team player and team builder. You work exceptionally well in multicultural and diverse settings. You are a diversity, equity, and inclusion advocate.
What you will learn (if you don’t know already)
- Software development companies—knowledge of the Software Development Lifecycle, Agile/Scrum method, and tools such as Jira (bonus points for Git and JQL). You will know classical release cycles, and continuous delivery for cloud products.
- Accessibility, localization, and user experience—We want to build user experiences that delight our customers globally. You will be a champion for ongoing improvement and a collaborator for implementation on our site.
- Content management systems—We author our content in Paligo, a structured content CCMS. Familiarity with structured content will make learning easier but it is not necessary.
- Website Technologies—Google Analytics, Search Console, and other web technologies that assist in enhancing user experience, collecting data, and assist us in measuring the effect of our work. You may also help implement third-party products such as feedback forms and search solutions on our website.
- Technical Writing—If you are a web manager who is new to tech writing, we’ll assist your process of learning best practices like taking inputs from hands-on experience and interviewing SMEs, writing in plain language, writing for localization, peer reviews, observing styles and standards, etc.