Technical writer

First off, we don't have many policies, but we have published some thoughts about hiring over at /jobs/. This explains some of the choices that we make and could help you figure out if we would be a cultural match.

If you don't know Transloadit yet, here is some information about our company.

Transloadit

Transloadit is a file uploading and encoding service for developers. Launched by three developers who met through open source in 2009, customers have been loving our clever API and top-notch support ever since.

Even though we're a young team, we have been running Node.js in production since 2009, which we believe to be longer than any other company in existance. As such we have had to invent a few wheels, which we subsequently shared with the world. Most notably: node-mysql, node-formidable and node-retry. These are modules that are now industry standards for dealing with MySQL, file uploads and networked/unreliable systems. We have also contributed a lot to Node.js itself.

Our most ambitious open source projects to date are Tus and Uppy. Tus is an open standard for resumable file uploads that aims to change the way the world does file uploading. It was started by Transloadit, and has been collaborated on by engineers at various leading tech companies, such as Google, GitHub, and Vimeo. Vimeo announced earlier this year that they began using Tus for all their video uploading. Cloudflare and Git LFS completed rolling out Tus support shortly after.

Uppy is our next open source JavaScript file uploader for web browsers and mobile apps. While development is still ongoing, we are nearing a 1.0 release and with 11,992 GitHub stars at the time of writing, Uppy is already starting to make some waves.

In many ways we owe our existence to open source. Our founders met through it, our API relies heavily on it, we meet potential team members through it, and it is primarily how we get exposure for our service. As a result, Transloadit allocates 80% of her resources to open source projects.

The Job

Transloadit is looking for a developer who enjoys technical writing to provide content around our projects in the form of blog posts, community forum posts, documentation, tutorials and walkthroughs.

The inspiration will come from two sources.

One: you'll be playing around with our tech. Namely, our

• commercial API for uploading & encoding: https://transloadit.com
• open SDKs for all major programming languages: https://github.com/transloadit
• open protocol for resumable file uploads: https://tus.io
• next-gen open source file uploader for web browsers: https://uppy.io

While doing so, you’ll be taking notes. The bad parts become issues for us to fix. The good parts can be turned into educational blog posts and walkthroughs.

Two: you'll hang out in our various Slack channels (we're a remote-first company, so Slack is our virtual office) and learn about new features and improvements that we're making. You'll take the lead, ask questions, decide what's interesting to write about, and execute on that.

Experience

We are a small, highly technical team and looking for someone who has experience with developing software, GitHub and Markdown. You'll need to have experience with Node.js or have no problem in picking that up quickly. Transloadit being a Node shop, this will help you to communicate better with the team and work with our internal scripts & tooling to write content more autonomously and efficiently. For the same reasons, we ask that you use Linux or macOS/BSD (or maybe you're proficient in Windows Subsystem for Linux?). We'd like to be more inclusive towards more operating systems, but we're not there yet.

You'll need to be able to clearly communicate in English, both written and verbally. You don't need to be an English major, however, since you will be working closely with our in-house editor/writer who can turn raw technical content into well-polished posts.

We think this is a great opportunity for tech students and freelancers with some spare time!

Hours and pay

We're looking to publish around two substantial posts each month, along with minor updates and tweaks to our documentation and demos. The job is for 20 to 32 hours a month, paying $25/h. You can read about our reasons for disclosing this in /jobs/.

You can work whenever you see fit, but we do require some overlap with our business hours (07:00-15:00 UTC) to allow for around two hours of actually working together. That way, we won't have to rely purely on async communication. Depending on what your preferred/comfortable working hours are, this may constrain us to only consider candidates who reside between UTC -5 and UTC +7.

It would be easiest if you could invoice us for your time spent working for us. That way, you will also get to keep most of this budget.

If you want, we can also put you on the payroll. That means you would technically be employed in Germany though, meaning half of it is lost on taxes/insurances and, unless you are from Germany, we might have some additional legal hurdles to take.

Remote, off-time, behavior, and expectations

Our stances on these matters can be found in /jobs/. In short: you can work from anywhere in the world. Our virtual office is powered by Slack. Take off-time as you see fit, all we ask is that you give us the heads-up and don't set expectations higher than you can meet. We are looking for people that are kind, resourceful and curious.

Stack

Here's our stack. Familiarity with these would be nice. The ones with a checkmark are important. Needless to say, you can learn about all of these at Transloadit.

How to apply

If this sounds interesting to you, please send your:

• Basic info (name, age, location/timezone in UTC, interests)
• Website if you have one (link)
• GitHub account (link)
• LinkedIn account if you have one (link)
• Relevant work experience (e.g. the blog post you are most proud of so far) (link)
• Resume (pdf)
• Motivation (inline with your email)

to hello@transloadit.com. ProTip: Keep it brief. 200 words is plenty and less is more!

We hope to hear from you soon!