Staff Technical Writer

Role summary

As a Staff Technical Writer, you'll own the quality and consistency of Viam's developer-facing documentation. Your work spans all four documentation types: reference docs, explanations, tutorials, and how-to guides. You'll transform rough drafts, working code, and technical walkthroughs into polished, publishable content that helps developers understand and adopt Viam. You’ll also develop docs from scratch through close collaboration with product engineering teams.

What you'll do

• Write and edit documentation that helps developers integrate Viam into their projects, from first API call to production deployment
• Maintain documentation standards and style guidelines that ensure consistency as content scales
• Contribute to and improve our documentation toolchain, including our Hugo framework, GitHub Actions workflows, and Vale linting configuration
• Review code samples for accuracy and clarity, working with engineers to resolve issues
• Contribute to information architecture decisions—how content is organized, navigated, and discovered
• Ensure documentation stays current as the platform evolves, identifying gaps and outdated content proactively
• Build robots and write programs using Viam yourself—we believe the best documentation comes from firsthand experience with the platform

What you bring

• Experience writing documentation for developers, with a portfolio that demonstrates your ability to explain technical concepts clearly
• Enough technical fluency to work through tutorials independently, run code samples, and identify errors—you don't need to be an engineer, but you need to be technically curious and comfortable at the command line
• Experience with docs-as-code workflows: Git, Markdown, static site generators (Hugo experience is a plus)
• Familiarity with documentation automation—linting tools like Vale, CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, or scripting to improve workflows
• Strong opinions about what makes documentation good, backed by experience seeing what works and what doesn't
• The ability to give and receive editorial feedback constructively
• Experience or genuine interest in working with physical hardware—you'll be building robots as part of this job
• Experience with robotics, IoT, or industrial automation is a plus but not required

In 3 months

• You understand the Viam platform and feel comfortable assembling robots based on tutorials and writing small programs for robots with our SDKs
• You are comfortable with our toolchain and have started contributing improvements to our workflows
• You are comfortable discussing the product with our engineers for documentation purposes
• You have shipped polished documentation for at least one major platform feature
• You’ve completed significant revision of a section of docs.

In 6-12 months

• You are continuing to revise and improve the Viam documentation
• You are improving the documentation based on qualitative and quantitative data
• You are building out or curating content to enable developers without hardware experience to use Viam
• You have established documentation standards that scale as the team and content grow
• You have made measurable improvements to our documentation infrastructure and automation

The starting salary range for this role is $165,000 - $235,000/year.