Software Engineer / Writer

Janestreet; New York (NY); On-site; USD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Janestreet in New York is looking for a programmer-who-writes or a writer-who-codes. The role involves creating documentation, building tools that support documentation, and developing training materials for new hires.

The candidate should possess excellent writing skills along with sufficient programming knowledge to navigate the codebase and contribute to tutorials. This is an opportunity to engage with engineering projects and improve technical content within the company.

Qualifications

• Ability to document code effectively.
• Experience in creating training materials.
• Skill in writing tutorials and overviews.

Responsibilities

• Create and maintain documentation for software.
• Build tools that support documentation processes.
• Develop training materials for new hires.
• Write tutorials and articles for external publication.

Skills

Excellent writing skills

Good programming skills

Job description

About the Position

We're looking to hire a programmer-who-writes, or a writer-who-codes.

Here are the kinds of things we’d like to have this person work on:

• Documentation. We’ve always believed that developers should spend time and effort documenting their own code, but at the same time, a great writer with a feel for the technology can raise the level of quality in a way that few developers can. Establishing a culture of great docs is especially important as we grow.
• Building tools that support documentation. So much documentation is auto-generated by our systems, whether as error messages, logs, automated emails, or library docstrings. Getting your hands dirty hacking on documentation‑adjacent tools will help not just to a first order, but will also make your other writing more effective.
• Training material. We have a ton of programs that new and experienced hires go through, ranging from an OCaml Bootcamp to Dev Teach‑ins that expose students to interesting technical problems from around the company. Part of the job is to make these better and mint more of them where valuable.
• Writing longer pieces. We need more tutorials and overviews on a variety of topics. We have an internal developer handbook that we’re writing, with a backlog of chapters—each one an opportunity to dive deep into some part of our stack. But there’s also a lot of external writing to be done, for instance on our blog, our programming podcast, for conferences, recruiting events, and more.

In terms of skills, we want someone who is both an excellent writer and good enough at programming to navigate our codebase, work through our tutorials, and write up examples. You might spend meaningful time embedded as an engineer on one of our projects, just to understand how we write software. But experience with functional programming, expressive type systems, OCaml, or finance are all unnecessary—we’re happy to teach you about these things here.