Технический писатель

Our software company is looking for a technical communicator proficient in written English to work in a team developing a modeling, optimization and process automation toolkit.

Major Activities
- Participate in a continuous product improvement process, maintaining and updating user documentation.
- Support generated documentation for several related projects, using our development tools effectively in the content development process.
- Explore product capabilities, understand the technology behind them, and describe these from the user's point of view.
- Process feedback, discover product use cases and priority topics.

Desired Skills and Experience- Solid English writing skills.

- Must come from an engineering or IT background.

- Must have experience explaining highly technical information at various levels of detail.
- Strong analytical skills. Ability to research new topics, organize large volumes of raw information, and present complex information in a clear, concise manner.
- Critical, detail-oriented and consistent thinking.
- Ability to handle a fast paced environment.
- Effective team communication skills.
- Technical interest and the aptitude to learn new software tools.
- Basic programming knowledge, ability to read simple code and understand concepts is a plus.

Requirements:

• solid English writing skills which you can prove with examples of your previous works,
• the ability to collect, discuss, analyze and restructure miscellaneous technical information, and
• the ability and readiness to learn how to use those tools that may be not yet familiar to you.

Details:

The following is a quick outline of what you will be working with. Eventually you will have to gain a good understanding of the things discussed below, but a priori knowledge is not required. Our developers are very helpful and will explain everything you need (and many things you actually do not). We develop a general purpose programming library for optimization, approximation, and related tasks, and a GUI application that wraps the methods implemented in this library into a visual programming environment and provides various application integration capabilities and additional tools for data analysis (plotting, statistics and such). Currently all documentation is built via Sphinx (sphinx-doc.org), which means you will write in reStructuredText (docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html) and use a few console commands to build and see the end-user HTML version. That is, no WYSIWYG editing. Our docs also contain a plenty of math which is written in TeX syntax (sphinx-doc.org/ext/math.html). The documentation is available on our website, so you can visit www.datadvance.net/product/macros/documentation.html or www.datadvance.net/product/pseven/documentation.html to see what it looks like.The first is that general purpose library, the second is that GUI application. In both manuals you can recognize several "work areas", and you will have an opportunity to pick the one that suits you. We are ready to provide with examples.
Obviously grasping it all at once is not possible, and this is not expected. In practice, you will probably begin with updating the existing content: there always are some outdated screenshots or instructions, explanations that can be improved to make them more clear, and so on. Such defects are easy to discover, and fixing them usually does not require a deep understanding of the described products, giving you a chance to test your skills and gather information in background.
Тестовое задание
Взять предложение на высоком канцелярском языке и сделать из него кусок дока на английском в соответствии со своим пониманием роли техрайтера.

> При нажатии на кнопку Add будет открываться диалог создания переменных Add variables, в котором пользователю предоставляется возможность указать имена и свойства новых создаваемых переменных, такие как: тип переменной (непрерывная, целочисленная, дискретная); верхняя и нижняя границы диапазона допустимых значений переменной (для переменных непрерывного типа); список допустимых значений переменной (для переменных целочисленного и дискретного типов); начальное значение переменной (используется только при работе с алгоритмами оптимизации; для переменных целочисленного типа должно входить в диапазон допустимых значений переменной, для переменных целочисленного и дискретного типов должно быть одним из значений, входящих в список допустимых значений переменной); ряд других.