Software Engineer / Writer | New York, NY, USA

Kardow; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Kardow in New York seeks a Software Engineer / Writer—an adaptable programmer-who-writes or writer-who-codes. The role blends coding with documentation, creating high-quality technical content alongside working code.

You will document projects, build tools to improve docs, and develop training materials for engineers. The ideal candidate writes clearly, navigates codebases, and enjoys explaining complex topics.

Qualifications

• Excellent written communication skills with the ability to explain complex concepts clearly.
• Ability to read and navigate a codebase to write meaningful documentation and tutorials.
• Willingness to contribute to training materials and tutorials for engineers.

Responsibilities

• Write and maintain developer documentation, tutorials, and blog posts.
• Develop tools that assist in generating or improving docs.
• Create training materials for onboarding and ongoing education.
• Author longer pieces and contribute to internal handbook and external blogs/podcasts.

Skills

Technical writing

Programming

Documentation

Code navigation

Tools

Git

Markdown

Documentation tooling

Job description

Software Engineer / Writer

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.