Technical Writer (CBP)

Agile Defense•Ashburn, VA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. Documentation in an environment like that is not a filing exercise. When something fails at three in the morning at a site nobody can reach quickly, the person working the problem needs a procedure that is correct, current, and findable. A document that is out of date does more damage than no document at all, because somebody will trust it. You are the person who makes that reliable. You will work with network, cloud, security, and field deployment engineers to turn what they know into documentation people use, and carry the program's required deliverables through federal review. Two things are worth knowing before you apply. The systems will change while you are writing about them, so anything you build has to assume revision rather than completion. And the engineers who hold the knowledge are busy and under change control, which means getting what you need from them is a skill this job depends on more than it depends on prose.

Requirements

Documented technical systems you were not an expert in, and can describe how you got up to speed.
Worked on a federal program and know in practice what handling controlled information requires.
Built documentation standards that outlasted your own involvement.
Got busy engineers to contribute to documentation without having any authority over them.
Hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance.
Work fluently in Markdown, Confluence, SharePoint, and a standard document toolchain.
Portfolio of documents people actually used.

Nice To Haves

Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Find out which documents people actually use and which they have quietly stopped trusting.
Name the documents an engineer opens during an incident, and the ones they skip and why.
Map what exists against what the program is required to produce.
Stop maintaining at least one thing nobody reads.
Cut the time engineers spend answering the same question twice.
Ensure questions that used to route to one specific person get answered by something findable.
Help new team members reach useful work without booking time with whoever holds the knowledge.
Ensure a search for a current procedure returns the current version rather than three candidates.
Facilitate engineers sending people to the documentation instead of explaining it again themselves.
Get deliverables through review without a rework cycle.
Ensure documents required by the contract arrive complete and on schedule.
Ensure reviewers ask about substance rather than returning things over format and completeness.
Ensure handling and marking requirements are correct before a document leaves the team.
Leave a documentation practice that keeps up with a system that changes.
Ensure updating the document is part of making the change rather than something that happens afterward.
Make stale content visible as stale rather than quietly wrong.
Create templates and standards that other people follow, so quality does not depend on who happened to write it.