Technical Writer

About Northwind Analytics

Northwind Analytics builds analytics tooling that runs directly on a customer's data warehouse. Our documentation has grown by accretion over five years and now contains three different explanations of how permissions work, at least two of which are wrong. We are engaging a contract technical writer for an initial six months to fix that, with a strong possibility of extension.

The company is around 140 people and works asynchronously by default, so this arrangement suits someone who is comfortable making progress without a daily check-in.

What you'll do

• Audit the existing documentation set, roughly 300 pages, and produce a prioritised plan for what to rewrite, merge, or delete outright.
• Rebuild the information architecture so that the difference between a concept, a task and a reference page is obvious to the reader.
• Rewrite the core guides: connecting a warehouse, modelling your first dataset, permissions and row-level security, and scheduled delivery.
• Work with engineers to bring our API reference back in line with what the API actually does, generating what can sensibly be generated.
• Establish a docs-as-code workflow with review conventions that engineers will realistically follow after you leave.
• Define a small style guide covering terminology, voice and the handful of decisions people keep relitigating.

What we're looking for

• Five or more years writing developer or data product documentation, with samples we can read.
• Fluency with a docs-as-code toolchain: Git, Markdown, pull request review, and a static site generator.
• Enough technical depth to write a working SQL example and test it yourself rather than asking an engineer to check.
• Demonstrated ability to restructure a large documentation set, not just write new pages into an existing mess.
• Self-direction. You will be the only writer on this project and are expected to set the pace.

Nice to have

• Experience documenting analytics, business intelligence or data infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with OpenAPI tooling.
• Previous contract work where you handed a project over cleanly at the end.

Benefits

• Fully asynchronous engagement with no required meeting hours beyond a weekly written update.
• Access to our learning budget for tooling and courses relevant to the work.
• Flexible schedule, invoiced monthly, with a minimum commitment of 20 hours per week.