Your Impact:

As a technical writer at Palo Alto Networks, you will directly help our customers, partners, and internal employees better understand how to configure and use our products using the API. We are looking for a writer who is curious not only about how a feature works, but also why and when to use it, what the best practices are for configuring it, and are keen on using the API to develop use cases that demonstrate how it works. 

In this role, you will enrich API reference documentation and supplement it with relevant sample code for Cloud Security Posture Management. This includes documenting API endpoint descriptions, responses, requests, query parameters, and data models. In addition, you will be a user advocate and provide feedback to development teams about the API and OpenAPI specifications.

You will own the authoring and publishing processes to make content accessible to our users in a timely manner for each release. 

About You:

• Facility with technology—You’re curious, not afraid to be hands-on with the products, and you can empathize with the challenges our customers face.

• Know the craft—You like writing more than you like doing anything else and you have an innate ability to think like and write for network administrators and DevOps professionals. You are adept at organizing documentation sets for new APIs and can develop the overall information architecture. 

• Innovation—You are curious, creative, and love to experiment with new ways to present information in a way that enables a positive user experience with our products.

• Initiative—You’re not afraid to propose changes to improve process and quality to improve the customer experience and you are relentless in hunting down the information you need.

• Interpersonal skills—You are able to work with developers, QA, PMs, customers, SEs, and support to successfully gather information required to understand the problems our users are facing and the ways our products help to solve them.

• Problem solving skills—You have strong critical-thinking skills and use them to ensure that you are providing just the information our users need to complete the task at hand. You can take a large amount of technical details and organize them into topics that users can easily find and use to solve their problems. 

Your Experience:

• Must have experience working with APIs and SDKs and immersing yourself in the API to develop use cases that showcase how to use the API to solve product integration challenges.

• Must have a good knowledge and background in network security and or cloud computing environment.

• Ability to see the big picture and proven track record of creating concepts, use cases, and best-practice workflows from scratch.

• Strong initiative and ability to work independently with limited direction.

• Ability to go and find out not only how something works, but also when and why to use a particular configuration/setting.

• Minimum 7-8 years of experience documenting technical content for a developer audience, including 3 years documenting REST APIs. You’re comfortable testing API requests with Postman, and you're familiar with OpenAPI/Swagger.
  Experience as a software engineer may be a substitute for some of the required years of experience as a technical writer.

• Comfortable using the command line and Unix. 

• Familiarity with reading and writing code in 1-2 programming languages or other technical foundations.
  Prefer experience with Python and UNIX shell scripting. Familiarity with Java is also a plus.

• Experience with source control tools (Git), bug tracking/collaboration tools (GitHub/Jira/Confluence), and build tools (GitLab).

• Education:  BA/BS or equivalent experience required.

• Proficient in Markdown.

• Experience with automating documentation publishing.

• Experience with topic-based writing (DITA or XML authoring) a plus.