About the company¶

Read the Docs is a large open source project providing documentation building and hosting. You can think of it as continuous integration for software docs. We serve over 500 million pageviews each year. This role will have a large impact on millions of users. Our codebase is almost entirely open source, and we feel strongly about supporting the open source community while sustaining the project in an ethical manner.

We have two primary products:

• A free hosting service for open source projects, funded via ethical ads: https://readthedocs.org

• A paid hosting service for companies, funded via subscriptions: https://readthedocs.com

We are pretty excited to be paid to work on a large open source project, and we hope you will be too!

About the job¶

This job will be our first developer advocate hire. You will be responsible for developer marketing and improving our documentation.

At the beginning of this year, we received a grant to support scientific software. Given this grant, the job will have two major parts:

• For 2021, around half your time will be spent working on work related to our grant. This focuses on improving our guide and tutorials for Read the Docs and supporting software in the ecosystem (Sphinx, docutils)

• The other half of your time will be spent working on Read the Docs itself, outside of the grant funding. This includes managing a number of improvements to our documentation structure, and improving our user guides.

Historically, we have had a very developer-focused audience, but we are trying to make our documentation more appropriate for less technical users. One of our first priorities will be creating more beginner and tutorial content for Read the Docs. This could perhaps include some video or audio content, along with written docs.

The other major part of this job will be creating and promoting the grant work we’re doing. We will need to do outreach into the Data Science community, and work to understand the needs of these users. Based on those needs, we will work to build new resources and raise awareness of existing resources that are relevent to these users.

Technical Details¶

Read the Docs is a large Python & Django web application. The current technologies that we’re using are:

• Sphinx/reStructuredText for documentation

• Read the Docs for building & hosting documentation :)

• Our blog is somewhat custom, built on Sphinx as well

• Twitter for most of our marketing and developer relations

You will be responsible for authoring documentation and marketing content using reStructuredText, using Sphinx and Pelican.

In terms of the develop relations work, the following skills will be useful:

• Interviewing project owners to understand their documentation needs and how we can help them

• Publishing blog posts promoting the content we’re writing

• Making small images and videos to make our content more compelling

• Other content marketing and developer marketing skills will be very useful

Everyone on our team does customer support¶

All of our team members are responsible for some of the basic operations of the project. As a small team, there are a lot of jobs to be done and not many hands to fill them. This means you will learn a lot about the functioning of a small (but mighty!) company and open source project.

User support is one of the main things you will be handling that spans the company. We have GitHub issues and emails that come in each day, and we have a support rotation for dealing with them. You can expect being the first line of support one day a week, but you can always ask the team for help with issues.

Hiring and interview process¶

You would be hired as a contractor and not an employee, because that is all we can support currently. We would contract you to work 4-5 days a week. Half of our team works 4 days, and the other half works 5 days, and we are happy to be flexible with whatever works best for you. We do offer the ability to expense work-related computer equipment, home office gear, and other approved expenses.

After an initial set of 2-3 interviews, we normally do a small paid project (4-6 hours, $500) to see how we work together. Assuming that goes well, we will offer a contract until the end of the calendar year. This contract then would be renewed yearly, along with evaluating pay and other benefits.

The pay rate will vary with experience and the number of days worked. As a small, self-sustaining open source project we are not able to pay as much as large companies. We are able to provide a supportive and very flexible work environment, with a strong sense of mission. Most of the members of our team have worked with us for more than 4 years, and we strive to have a stable team working to build something meaningful.

We are a fully remote company and our team is currently based in the US, South America, and Europe. We hope to work with people that are based in timezone where we have some overlap with the entire team, which is around UTC-8 to UTC+1.

Applying¶

We will be accepting applications on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Update: This role has been filled. If you’re interested in working with us, we’re always happy to hear from you, but we aren’t actively hiring for this role currently.