Senior Technical Writer for PostgreSQL Products at Percona

About the Role

Percona is seeking a skilled and adaptable Technical Writer to join one of our distributed open source software development teams. In this role, you will specifically focus on the PostgreSQL database and its related components, collaborating closely with our dedicated PostgreSQL team. Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL integrates essential enterprise components from the broader PostgreSQL open source community into a single, cohesive distribution, rigorously designed and tested for compatibility.

You will serve as Percona's voice to our technical customers, delivering comprehensive and clear documentation for our PostgreSQL products. We are looking for an individual committed to producing consistent, high quality, and timely documentation, whether in the form of installation guides, user manuals, help files, or man pages. You should be comfortable operating in version controlled environments, as we embrace a docs-as-code methodology.

You will be embedded within the PostgreSQL team while also collaborating with the broader Product Documentation team, which consists of several technical writers focused on developing a scalable documentation strategy to drive user adoption and effective use of our products. You are expected to work with other writers as we continuously strive to enhance our practices.

This is a remote, work from home position open to worldwide candidates. The team's median time zone is UTC-2, so we recommend candidates operate within +/- 4 hours of this baseline.

What You Will Do

• Create all necessary technical documentation, including installation, configuration, and troubleshooting guides, how to articles, user manuals, man pages, and command line --help prompts.
• Actively participate in team ceremonies. Collaborate with the Engineering Manager, Product Manager, Developers, and Quality Assurance to produce high quality documentation.
• Utilize text, markdown, images, and diagrams to ensure that audiences of all experience levels can gain value from our documentation.
• Leverage AI tooling to efficiently draft, refine, format, and polish content.
• Maintain documentation versioning and actively contribute to our overall documentation strategy.

Your Experience

• Excellent written English at a graduate level and strong verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated experience documenting complex systems and writing user oriented documentation.
• Over 3 years of experience as a technical writer with a proven ability to produce high quality and precise documentation.
• Experience with markup languages (Markdown preferred).
• Familiarity with the installation and configuration of database server software on Linux.
• Experience with a docs-as-code approach. Knowledge of Jenkins, git, Markdown, HTML, and/or JavaScript is strongly recommended.
• Proven experience leveraging AI tools for documentation purposes.
• Comfortable using the Linux command line.
• Experience with distributed system development and/or database server development.
• Fluent in developer tools such as git, gcc, and gdb.
• Ability to work autonomously in a globally distributed organization.
• Experience collaborating with open source communities and colleagues via mailing lists, Slack, etc.
• Proficiency in using collaboration and tracking tools like Jira/Notion.
• Demonstrated success working effectively in a distributed environment.
• A quick learner and an excellent team player.

What Will Truly Make You Stand Out

• A background in development or DevOps.
• A track record of contributing to PostgreSQL or other open source projects, or being an active member of the PostgreSQL community.
• A solid understanding of PostgreSQL internals to write accurate content and potentially contribute upstream.
• A strong working knowledge of advanced concepts such as database storage engines, at-rest encryption, and cloud orchestration.
• Ability to build and maintain automated documentation testing, CI/CD pipelines for the documentation process, and validation tools.
• Experienced conference speaker, technical blog writer, or active participant on public forums or mailing lists.

Communication, Travel, and Remote Collaboration

Percona is a globally distributed, remote first organization that values active communication and collaboration. While working from your home office, it's essential to engage openly and proactively with your team. We promote lively discussions, idea sharing, and transparent work updates. To foster a strong team environment, we rely on consistent communication through tools like Slack, Zoom, and Jira, which keep us connected, aligned, and supportive across different time zones. Although travel is not always necessary, there may occasionally be opportunities for conferences or in person meetups to strengthen relationships and ensure strategic alignment.

Working Environment, Planning, and Growth

At Percona, we prioritize a structured work environment to support your focus and flow. We organize tasks within specific timeframes and scopes, minimizing shifting priorities to allow you to concentrate on assigned tasks. This planning process is collaborative, involving the entire team, Product, and customer insights. Professional growth is a focus for us, as we designate Fridays as no meeting days. This provides dedicated time for deep work, tackling challenging issues, or exploring new technologies.

Typical Day as a Technical Writer in the PostgreSQL Team at Percona

• Morning (flexible, as you own your schedule): Start your day by checking Slack, email, and Jira for updates. Focus on writing tasks: new features, guides, bug fixes, and release notes for PostgreSQL and related tools. Respond to open and outstanding requests if needed.
• Mid-day: Lunch break and casual Slack interactions. Resume writing, attend technical discussions (if scheduled), planning sessions, or join a brief team sync (Zoom).
• Afternoon: Continue focusing on writing tasks. Reply to questions on the forum, draft blog posts, or contribute to upstream documentation. Research and learn new technologies. Plan for the next day and wrap up tasks.

Key Points

• Expect regular communication through Slack, Zoom, and Jira.
• Active engagement in team rituals is a must.
• Continuous learning and problem solving are fundamental to the role.
• Work hours are flexible, around scheduled team syncs or customer meetings.
• We do not micromanage your tasks; instead, we hire you for your expertise and capacity to deliver high quality documentation.

Why Percona?

At Percona, we believe an open world is a better world. Our mission is to enable everyone to innovate freely, by providing the best open source database software, support, and services. We make databases and applications run better through a unique combination of expertise and open source software built with the community for you. Our technical teams are experts in MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB. Percona is proud to be a remote only and globally dispersed workforce--we have colleagues in more than 50 countries! We offer a collaborative, highly engaged culture where your ideas are welcome and your voice is heard. Our staff receives generous benefits including flexible work hours and various paid time off programs, all your equipment for your remote office, funds for career development (external training, certifications, conferences), ongoing connectivity allowances, and the opportunity to participate in our equity incentive plan. We also have benefits that support a healthy work/life balance such as The Percona Adventure Team, Work-from-Anywhere, FlowDays, FryDays, and overall flexibility. We also support being socially responsible through our PAVE volunteering program and Women Transforming Technology. If you love the idea of working with a high growth tech company that is one of the best in the business and known globally as a leader in the open source database space, let's talk! Connect with us and stay up to date on our latest news and developments by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter. We look forward to connecting with you!