Technical Writer

Atoms•San Francisco, CA

7d•$87,000 - $134,000•Onsite

About The Position

Atoms is seeking a Technical Writer to establish and maintain the documentation infrastructure for their manufacturing and engineering operations as they scale towards mass production. This role involves close collaboration with production, engineering, and quality teams to transform existing knowledge and ongoing processes into clear, consistent, and user-friendly documentation. The Technical Writer will create work instructions, test procedures, troubleshooting guides, and engineering release notes. This is a hands-on position requiring time spent on the production floor, observing builds, interacting with technicians, and gathering process details directly. The quality of documentation is crucial for build consistency, training efficiency, and minimizing downtime, making this a high-impact, early-stage hire.

Requirements

Experience writing technical or process documentation in a manufacturing, hardware, automotive, aerospace, or similar hands-on production environment.
Comfort working directly on the production floor, observing builds, interviewing technicians, and translating hands-on process knowledge into clear written and visual instructions.
Strong organizational skills with a natural inclination for structure, version control, and findability.
Experience with Notion and Linear (or similar knowledge-base tools) for building and organizing documentation systems.
Ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, quality, and production teams.
Skill in keeping documentation synchronized with rapid changes.
Clear, concise writing ability to make complex processes understandable.
Comfort with ambiguity and building processes from scratch.
Familiarity with BOM structures, engineering change processes (ECOs/ECNs), or PLM tools is preferred.
Experience building troubleshooting/diagnostic trees or decision-based guides is preferred.
Background supporting test engineering or test procedure documentation is preferred.
Experience documenting for a pre-mass-production or scaling manufacturing environment is preferred.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with BOM structures, engineering change processes (ECOs/ECNs), or PLM tools.
Experience building troubleshooting/diagnostic trees or decision-based guides.
Background supporting test engineering or test procedure documentation.
Experience documenting for a pre-mass-production or scaling manufacturing environment.

Responsibilities

Standardize work instructions across all manufacturing workstations, ensuring consistent format, detail level, and visual style.
Maintain up-to-date build-step instructions as workstations increase, processes change, and engineering updates are implemented.
Create, update, and revise procedures for test steps, test programs, rework processes, and build procedures.
Organize and maintain the knowledge base, developing new content and improving structure for easy information retrieval.
Review BOM changes and publish engineering release notes, ensuring production teams understand changes and their rationale.
Develop troubleshooting and diagnostic documentation using field diagnostic data to reduce downtime by clarifying root causes and resolution paths.
Support engineering documentation standards, contributing to the formalization of design and process documentation creation and maintenance as the team expands.