Principal Technical Writer — Customer Onboarding Strategy

Elastic; Detroit (MI); Remote; USD 128,000 - 203,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and family

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Volunteer time off (40 hours/year)

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Job summary

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Technical Writer to lead onboarding and Getting Started content. You will transform onboarding materials into a cohesive, narrative-driven experience, guiding users from first setup to first value.

You will partner with the SSC team and align across field, product, and docs to improve trial-to-paid conversion and content effectiveness. You will shape narrative architecture for the user journey, championing the new-user experience while

Qualifications

• 7+ years of relevant experience in technical writing or developer-focused roles, with a proven track record in onboarding or user journey design.
• Cross-functional leadership with ability to influence stakeholders across product, engineering, and field organizations.
• Deep narrative skills for creating cohesive stories around complex technical products.
• Data-driven mindset with comfort using analytics, UXR, and support data to inform documentation decisions.
• Collaborative experience in large, distributed organizations requiring alignment across teams.
• Customer knowledge with self-service cloud products and understanding of onboarding, evaluation and adoption.

Responsibilities

• Drive the onboarding content strategy. Define and execute a cohesive narrative for how users learn to use our products, ensuring a seamless story from the first visit to successful deployment.
• Align Field, Product, and Docs. Act as a central point of contact for stakeholders. Work with Product teams to understand roadmap changes, Field teams to identify friction points, and Documentation teams to ensure high-quality content output.
• Design user-focused flows. Create organized onboarding experiences highlighting best practices, troubleshooting, and clear next steps.
• Measure and iterate using user research, support feedback, and telemetry to reduce churn and improve time-to-first-value.

Skills

Onboarding design

Cross-functional leadership

Narrative storytelling

Data-driven decision making

User journey mapping

Technical writing

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, is seeking a Principal Technical Writer to lead onboarding and Getting Started content. You will transform onboarding materials into a cohesive, narrative-driven experience, guiding users from first setup to first value.

You will partner with the SSC team and align across field, product, and docs to improve trial-to-paid conversion and content effectiveness. You will shape narrative architecture for the user journey, championing the new-user experience while