palo_alto_networks is hiring: Technical Writer Release Notes in Santa Clara

As a Technical Writer at Palo Alto Networks, you will directly help our customers, partners, and internal employees to better understand how to configure and use our products. Your primary contribution will be to manage (create and maintain) the release notes documentation for Palo Alto Networks products. Additionally, you will support the Tech Pubs team by resolving doc bugs, identifying and addressing customer documentation concerns, and performing copy edits and production reviews of content before it is published to our website.

This position requires you to be a quick learner. You will need to become familiar with all Palo Alto Networks technology and hardware and to collaborate with a diverse group of engineers throughout our company who will help you to accurately determine status and to author and get approval for descriptions of release notes issues. You will need to be flexible, creative, and committed to delivering accurate and quality documentation as determined by our release dates through a combination of the following competencies:

• Facility with technology: You’re not afraid to be hands-on with the product and put yourself in the user's shoes. You are curious not only about how a feature works but also what the consequences are if a customer is incorrectly informed about a known issue or change to behavior.
• Facility with the written word: You like writing more than you like doing anything else and you have an innate ability to take complex material and explain issues in concise, consistent, and easy-to-understand descriptions.
• Customer focus: You can account for the many readers of Palo Alto Networks documentation who are not, yet, networking experts by translating technical jargon into descriptions that are easily understood.
• Commitment to quality: You welcome, regularly reference, and help improve style and terminology guidelines to ensure that documentation—both English and translated—is consistent, accurate, and efficient.
• Quick learner: You enjoy and excel at solving puzzles; you can quickly grasp new concepts and how concepts are related so that you can accurately identify and isolate the facts that a customer must know to resolve their issues.
• Interpersonal skills: You can quickly establish collaborative relationships with developers, QA, Product Managers, customers, SEs, and technical support engineers to gather the information you will need to thoroughly and accurately develop and deliver release notes on time.
• Planning and organization: You can track and manage multiple overlapping releases and often complex email threads and other avenues of research with minimal direction.
• Flexible: You excel at multitasking and can transition from one task to another seamlessly to accommodate changes in deadlines, status, understanding, and availability of SMEs.
• Attention to detail: You ensure that you make time to edit your work to ensure the grammatical, stylistic, and technical accuracy demanded of enterprise-level documentation before submitting documents to coworkers for technical and copy edit reviews.
• Initiative: You’re not afraid to propose changes to improve process and quality.

Qualifications:

• 2-5 years’ technical writing for a networking or network security company.
• Must have a good knowledge and background of networking and security products, including an ability to perform basic configuration of these products.
• Strong initiative and ability to work independently with limited direction.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proficient with Excel, including the ability to create and utilize scripts for filtering, identifying, and tracking bugs; experience with both visual basic and managing cases in JIRA is highly desirable.
• Proficient with FrameMaker and Acrobat Pro.
• Experience with Structured FrameMaker is a plus, as is experience with topic-based writing and DITA XML in general; experience with Adobe AEM6 is also desirable.

Learn more about Palo Alto Networks HERE and check out our FAST FACTS.