About the company¶

Read the Docs is a large open source project providing documentation building and hosting. You can think of it a continuous integration for docs. We serve over 500 million pageviews each year. We are a small team, but 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

This role would primarily be working on the core Read the Docs codebase and extensions to Sphinx that we maintain.

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

Additional Responsibilities¶

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 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.

Requirements¶

We hope for someone with experience and vision to improve the product. We are a small team and you will be given a lot autonomy in building and improving things, so being self-driven is an asset.

Being familiar with some or most of the tools listed above would be great, however we believe experience with similar tools should translate easily as well. Having some knowledge of the data science community is also useful, given the grant work that will be part of this role. We realize that you might not know all of our tools, please reach out if you think you’d be a good fit.

We are a fully remote company and our team is currently based in the US, South America, and in 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.

Structure¶

We are currently only able to offer contracts to work on the project. 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.

After an initial interview, we normally do a small paid project (4-6 hours) to see how we work together. Assuming that goes well, we will offer a contract until the end of the calendar year.

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. All of the members of our team have worked with us for more than 2 years, and we strive to have a stable team working to build something meaningful.

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.