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¶

Our company is quite small, so this job will require doing many different things. You will join our team that is focused on building and growing our various Read the Docs products. This means you will work to help us figure out what features to build, work with the team to build those features, and then figure out how to explain them to our users.

Each day will be a bit different, but some of the tasks that we might ask you to do are:

• Create design documents that argue for both the business & technical benefits of features.

• Implement features in our Python & Django web app.

• Review code that other members of our team has written, as well as contributors to our open source projects, in a respectful manner.

• Engage with customers via email support, offering helpful suggestions or explaining tradeoffs in our product.

• Write docs and blog posts for some of the work that you’ve done.

• Assist with weekly releases by monitoring, testing, and debugging our application.

• Create a landing page that explains how our product is great for a specific set of users (eg. data scientists, Python developers, SaaS product docs, etc.)

We don’t expect you to be experienced in doing all these tasks, but hope for someone who is excited to learn how to do them. If you’re really great at 1-2 of them, that’s a great starting point for this role.

Who would be a good fit?¶

Any of these people would be a good fit:

• Someone who has built, documented, and blogged about a feature in an open source project

• Someone who has advocated for a new feature being built at their current company, and then built it

• Someone who has worked to get a feature that they built used by more people via a blog post and improved docs

• Anyone who has used Read the Docs, and could tell us why they would build a new feature in the product

• Someone who has contributed to Sphinx development, or has built and maintained a Sphinx extension

The thing we want is to work with skilled people who are excited to work on our product. If that’s you, please apply below!

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.

Please fill out the below form to apply for this role. Normal response time is 3-5 days, and we intend to reply to all candidates who complete the application.