Sr. Technical Writer, Mission Autonomy

Anduril • Santa Ana, CA

4d

About The Position

Anduril is a defense technology company that aims to solve critical challenges by providing advanced technology for better decision-making in high-stakes situations. The Mission Autonomy team specifically develops the software ecosystem for commanding and controlling collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). This software supports the entire lifecycle of these vehicles, including operator training, mission planning, execution, and debriefing. The team's software is designed to be platform-agnostic and integrated with government reference architectures. Responsibilities include autonomy software development, system integration, flight test support, and creating essential technical documentation. The company is seeking an experienced senior technical writer to develop and maintain autonomy software documentation that meets program and customer requirements, ensuring the documentation quality matches the product quality.

Requirements

• 5+ years of demonstrated excellence generating technical documentation, including documentation for software or software-intensive systems.
• Experience reading and interpreting engineering documentation, including interface and message definitions, schemas, and requirements artifacts.
• Comfort reading source code.
• Experience building content in a variety of content authoring tools including word editors and specialized authoring software (e.g. Arbortext, RapidAuthor).
• Working knowledge of S1000D structured authoring, including data module development against a Common Source Data Base and applicable business rules.
• Comfort working in a developer toolchain: Git-based version control and pull request review, Markdown or MDX, and documentation that builds and deploys through CI as part of a software pipeline.
• Strong communication (written and verbal) and interpersonal skills, with emphasis on technical subjects.
• Must thrive with autonomy and responsibility, managing competing priorities and tight deadlines.
• Impeccable project-management skills.
• Passion for excellent documentation and user experience.
• Must be eligible for Secret and higher security clearance (US).

Nice To Haves

• Experience writing technical user-facing documentation.
• Previous experience creating technical documentation in Aerospace and Defense (for DoD).
• Experience documenting uncrewed aircraft systems, autonomy or AI/ML software, flight software, or mission planning systems.
• Familiarity with government reference architectures, applications, and interfaces for autonomy and collaborative combat aircraft (e.g. A-GRA, A-GRI), and with the message-level interfaces they define.
• Hands-on experience with a documentation static site generator such as Docusaurus, MkDocs, or Sphinx, including sidebar and information architecture, search, and diagram-as-code tooling such as Mermaid.
• Military exposure and experience, particularly with military technical documentation writing and formatting standards, guidelines, and verbiage (S1000D, MIL-STD-40051, etc), and with flight manual standards such as MIL-STD-38784 or MIL-DTL-7700.
• Experience Documenting Software Release content in an Agile environment.
• Experience supporting airworthiness, safety-of-flight, or test readiness review documentation.

Responsibilities

• Partner with autonomy, platform integration, and flight test teams to deliver accurate, updated, and easy-to-understand documentation for integrating, configuring, and operating Mission Autonomy software.
• Organize engineering and program delivery functions related to documentation.
• Collaborate with engineers, autonomy behavior developers, test engineers, and subject matter experts to understand software, identify workflows, and use documentation to bridge gaps.
• Set the standard for tone, voice, and quality across written artifacts.
• Ensure operators understand how autonomy behaves, its limitations, and how to task, override, and approve its actions.
• Make the process of learning to employ autonomous systems seamless through exceptionally written and presented artifacts.
• Identify relevant stakeholders and lead them through a documentation roadmap with key milestones and targets.
• Ensure stakeholders are engaged at the right time and guide them towards user-facing documents that meet customer needs.
• Work with account teams to ensure contract deliverables, including documentation aligned with government reference architectures and flight test schedules, are accurate, on time, and in the correct format.
• Generate, review, and edit user-focused documentation.
• Document autonomy behaviors, operating modes, and failure/contingency handling, ensuring documentation is current with behavior changes.
• Own interface and message reference documentation for the autonomy stack, supporting vendor integration events with clear, testable interface documentation.
• Produce accurate developer and integrator reference material, including architecture and design documents, sequence and state diagrams, and configuration references.
• Contribute to Anduril’s technical writing toolkit, including style guides, documentation lifecycle, review processes, and software tool procurement.
• Run the intake and triage process for documentation requests and keep the published site accurate, navigable, and current.
• Evaluate and prioritize tasks to support product documentation efforts.
• Communicate and manage expectations, noting risks with adequate time, identifying mitigations, and allocating resources.
• Support flight test and demonstration events by capturing procedures, configurations, lessons learned, and updating documentation based on test results.
• Build a culture of technical documentation by creating processes and training for others to contribute content.
• Refine the product maturity framework so that documentation is a meaningful step towards productization.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants
• Top-tier benefits for full-time employees
• Comprehensive, competitive benefits package (available at little to no cost to employees) ensures you’re supported in health, recovery, and whatever comes next.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed