Director of Technical Documentation/Writing

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, and we sit within a broader team whose focus is on integrated product support. We are seeking an experienced Technical Documentation Director to lead a team to create and maintain user documentation across our diverse business lines. We believe that the quality of our documentation should reflect the quality of products, which are world-class.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As an experienced Technical Documentation Director, your mission is to lead our team in delivering exceptional, user-centric product documentation. In this role, you will design and deliver a forward-looking strategy, streamline documentation processes, and lead a team of technical writers, editors, and illustrators to produce content that meets both user needs and business objectives. You will 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 organize our engineering and program delivery functions in this mission. 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, you will play a foundational role in setting the bar for tone, voice, and 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 team’s mission is to make the process of learning how to operate systems as easy and seamless as possible, with exceptionally well written and presented artifacts.

You will supervise your team’s efforts to identify relevant stakeholders and lead them through documentation roadmaps with established key milestones and targets. This will require an in-depth understanding of what teams are relevant to documentation, and what an organized effort toward collaboration entails. You are to ensure that stakeholders are engaged at the right time, and you will guide them towards a finished user-facing document that plainly meets customer needs. Finally, your team will work with account managers to ensure that contract deliverables are accurate, on-time, and in the right format.

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

Along with our commercial offerings outlined above, Anduril is pursuing Programs with the US Government, which require documentation in MIL-STD-40051D, and S1000D, delivered via IADs. Familiarity with these standards is highly desired.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Establish a comprehensive documentation strategy that aligns with product roadmaps, including scalable content architectures and clear style guides.
• Design and implement a streamlined documentation intake, review, and management workflow to support product release cycles.
• Implement performance metrics and key indicators to track documentation quality and success.
• Maintain high standards for clarity, consistency, and technical accuracy in all documentation.
• Identify high-priority areas for improvement in existing documentation, devising and executing actionable improvement plans.
• 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 also 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 consider input from stakeholders to ensure well-informed decisions. 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

• 8+ years of demonstrated excellence generating technical documentation.
• 3+ years of experience managing teams of technical writers, editors, illustrators, etc.
• Experience writing technical user-facing 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. Oxygen Author, Raytheon Eagle, Siemens PLM, etc).
• 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.
• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Military exposure and experience, particularly with military technical documentation writing and formatting standards, guidelines, and verbiage (MIL-STD-40051, S1000D, etc).
• Previous experience creating technical documentation in Aerospace and Defense (for DoD).
• Experience delivering content on fast-paced, complex projects with multiple stakeholders.
• Ability to use data insights to refine and optimize content strategies.