Senior Manager, Technical Publications

ABOUT THE TEAM

Anduril’s Mission Success team is a cross-functional group that partners with every business line and supports all products that Anduril builds. Our responsibilities include product operations, training and adoption, and user documentation. We are seeking an experienced senior technical writer or manager to to lead high-profile and demanding programs for our government customers. We believe that the quality of our documentation should reflect the quality of products, which are world-class.

ABOUT THE JOB

As a Senior Manager, Technical Publications (also referred to internally as a Senior Technical Publications Manager), your mission is to partner with our numerous product and operations teams to deliver accurate, updated, and easy-to-understand documentation on how to use Anduril products. You will do whatever it takes to manage, organize and dispatch work to our staff of technical writers in order to meet our mission and program delivery requirements. In this role, you will work closely with engineers, operations, and various subject matter experts to understand our products, identify user workflows, and use documentation to close the gap. As such, the technical documentation manager will play a key role in cultivating our team members’ professional development, hitting our delivery targets, and ensuring quality across our written artifacts.

With Anduril’s focus on defense and national security, user documentation plays a critical role in ensuring front-line operators know how to leverage the “arsenal of democracy.” Your mission is to make the process of learning how to operate systems as easy and seamless as possible, with exceptionally written and presented artifacts.

You are to ensure that stakeholders are engaged at the right time, and you will manage our writing staff’s daily tasks to ensure that we are delivering finished user-facing document that meets our standards and customer requirements. Finally, you will provide status and performance metrics to the head of technical documentation to ensure that contract deliverables are accurate, on-time, and in the right format.

Written content artifacts under this charter may include things like: technical manuals, operational manuals, maintenance manuals, procedures, checklists, templates, user guides, troubleshooting guides, and release notes. You will assist the head of technical documentation to partner with account, product, and engineering teams across all phases of product development to ensure users have the right documentation available.

Another critical aspect of this role is to facilitate the transition to infrastructure and tooling needed for creating and maintaining our documentation content at scale. This structure will enable technical writing contributions from elsewhere across the business. In this role, you will coordinate efforts to define requirements, assign testing and discovery tasks team members, and develop training to scale this function across other teams.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Generate, review, and edit documentation that is user-focused. Work with engineering and operations to deliver task, conditions, standard-centric documentation
• Contribute to Anduril’s technical writing toolkit - working on everything from style guides to the documentation lifecycle and review process, and relevant software tool procurement through definition requirements for things like authoring and publishing tools
• Evaluate and prioritize tasks required to successfully support product documentation efforts and keep them on track. Help drive the best decision for the company by using a data-driven approach and execute input from leadership and stakeholders to deliver results. You should be prepared to fill gaps that represent risks to the documentation roadmap
• Communicate and help manage expectations. Ensure risks are noted with adequate time, mitigations are identified, and resources are allocated
• Help build a culture of technical documentation by creating process and training for others to contribute content. Refine our product maturity framework so that documentation is a meaningful step towards productization of new systems

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 7+ years of demonstrated excellence generating technical documentation
• Experience reading and interpreting engineering documentation
• Experience building content in a variety of content authoring tools including word editors and specialized authoring software (e.g. RapidAuthor, Arbortext)
• Strong communication (written and verbal) and interpersonal skills, with emphasis on technical subjects
• Must thrive with autonomy and responsibility, managing competing priorities and tight deadlines. Impeccable project-management skills
• Passion for excellent documentation and user experience
• Must be eligible for Secret and higher security clearance (US)
• Ability to relocate, if not already local to be onsite in Costa Mesa, CA
• In this role, you will be subject to pre-employment and randomized substance screening, as required by the Company.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience writing technical user-facing documentation
• Previous experience creating technical documentation in Aerospace and Defense (for DoD), S1000D, or other applicable MIL-STDs.
• Military exposure and experience, particularly with military technical documentation writing and formatting standards, guidelines, and verbiage
• Experience leading and managing teams on fast-paced, complex projects with multiple stakeholders