API Guru and Technical Author

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Alex Bligh

Are you an API guru and technical author with outstanding abilities, who is interested in working for a small and dynamic team? If so, we are interested in hearing from you.

Flexiant develops Cloud Computing Orchestration software for hosting companies, data centre operators, and telecoms providers.

The company is based in Livingston, Scotland, and provides a competitive salary with private health care, stock options, and benefits. The company is based in Livingston, Scotland, and provides a competitive salary with private health care, stock options, and benefits. Salary will depend on experience: we’re open as to whether we hire someone with 2 years’ or 20 years’ experience. As a guideline, we’d expect to be paying between £33,000 and £37,000.

We’d prefer someone who could work from our offices in Livingston (an easy commute from either Edinburgh or Glasgow), but would consider remote workers who can demonstrate a history of successful remote working on collaborative programming projects, need minimal supervision, and are prepared to visit our offices every couple of weeks so we can remember what you look like.

The role

This role is unusual: our product is modular and highly configurable, and the modules communicate with each other through APIs. Programmers do not always produce the finest quality documentation, and what they do produce is often not suitable for third parties. What we are looking for is someone who can combine technical authorship capabilities with understanding the code behind it. You will be responsible for:

• Producing our development manuals documenting our APIs;
• Helping to produce the technical aspects of our administration manual covering configuration and installation of the product;
• Understanding how our APIs work and ensuring that they serve customer needs;
• Ensuring that the product manuals (particularly on installation and configuration) remain up to date and relevant whilst the underlying product changes;
• Providing a resource to our support team when they have queries on our APIs; and
• Producing unit tests to ensure our documentation is correct, and provide examples in the manuals.

Desired Skills & Experience

A successful candidate will be a highly capable technical author, with an excellent command of the English language, and a proven ability to communicate clearly and concisely. The candidate will be very familiar with SOAP and Web Service APIs, and XML, and be happy to read, and occasionally modify Java code.

The ideal candidate would also have:

• Experience with XML, and maintaining SOAP and Web service APIs;
• A fully working knowledge of Java;
• Experience of working using version control systems on projects where more than one programmer is participating; and
• Familiarity with system administration of Linux at the command line.

The main thing we need is the ability to take whatever is thrown at you (we’re a small company after all), to work independently, and to produce fantastic documentation from sometimes illegible code, preferably some time before we’ve even thought to suggest you start writing it.

Interested?

If so, please download our application pack, which will tell you how to apply.

Application pack (.pdf 300 KB)

We are not currently interested in hearing from recruitment agencies, so please do not email us.