Documentation Engineer

About Protocol Labs

Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. Protocol Labs is a product-development lab, but behind the protocols and tools we build, behind the research and implementations, are passionate people, teammates, and community members. Most teams in the Protocol Labs Network are fully distributed and work remotely around the world. Engineers, researchers, and operators work in the open to improve the internet — humanity's most important technology — as we explore new advances at the intersection of many exciting fields (web3, cryptography, networks, distributed systems) and cultures (startups, research, open-source, distributed work).

The Bacalhau Project (https://bacalhau.org) seeks an extraordinary Documentation Engineer to help lay the foundation for a more resilient, more secure, decentralized version of the web by leading documentation efforts for Bacalhau.

Documentation at Protocol Labs and Bacalhau

Engineering at Protocol Labs is not just about writing world-class code, it is also about documenting that code and making it easily usable by other projects in the open-source decentralization community. Great documentation is much more than just an API reference and some tutorials. It is an entire end-to-end user journey, from a user’s first hearing of the Bacalhau project to checking out what it can do, to testing some examples and finally deciding whether Bacalhau is suitable for their project or company.

As a Documentation Engineer, you will focus on documenting the Bacalhau Project (https://bacalhau.org), a peer-to-peer network of nodes that can form the basis for the next generation of decentralized, networked computations. While writing documentation and example code will be a major part of the job, you will also need to take a holistic perspective on the average user’s learning journey and devise a way to present educational material in a way that engages users while carrying them on a journey from novice to intermediate to expert.

Bacalhau has the potential for various data-intensive projects ranging from decentralized video to blockchains to executing browser-based dApps. We believe that improving documentation can significantly accelerate the adoption of the project by other open-source projects.

As a Documentation Engineer at Protocol Labs you will…

• Devise a plan to document all aspects of Bacalhau, including usage examples, conceptual documentation, and specification writing.
• Affect the lives of countless people you help bring into this community.
• Work directly with Software Engineers to understand the abstractions and interfaces that Bacalhau offers to programmers and document them in a way that helps programmers go from zero to expert in a step-by-step fashion.
• Assist the DevRel team in creating other resources, including blogs, user guides, FAQs, tutorials, and white papers.
• Edit and review content created by others for technical accuracy and clarity.
• Proactively identify gaps in the documentation or knowledge base articles.
• Position Bacalhau as the leader in serverless computing through storytelling across platforms

You can Deliver and maintain high-quality, user-centered content including:

• Create clear, accessible, and concise content through collaborating with everyone from developers to end users
• Examples might include code documentation, technical guides, API documentation, example code, landing pages, and interface messaging
• Review and provide feedback on pull requests that involve documentation, blog posts, etc, to ensure language is concise, clear, and technically correct
• Be responsible for ensuring the greater team updates readmes, docs, tutorials and comments whenever public-facing APIs or other offerings change
• Incorporate continuous feedback from users, peers, and stakeholders by leading content-focused usability and critique sessions
• Make content generation and iteration work visible and trackable in our shared project management tools, as well as through appropriate use of our existing GitHub repositories

Implement tooling to generate, format, and test documentation including:

• Maintaining, developing, and improving sites such as https://github.com/bacalhau-project/docs.bacalhau.org
• Also, maintaining, developing, and improving sites for Bacalhau side: https://docs.bacalhau.org/
• You should be comfortable enough in code to be able to create, edit, and test documentation-related websites

You may be a fit for this role if you have...

• Have experience as a developer in Go, Docker, ideally in the context of an Open Source Software project.
• Are comfortable reading source code and documenting it.
• Understand the challenges of keeping documentation up to date with improvements in the code, and how to write just enough documentation to be helpful but not so much that the docs fall behind the state of the code.
• Have demonstrated expertise leading content work with cross-functional, iterative teams on time-sensitive projects
• Have a successful track record in creating documentation or other content to synthesize and simplify technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences
• Have a technical background and demonstrated fluency in distributed computing systems or other technical concepts relevant to our work
• Have strong written and verbal communication skills in both community-facing and internal settings
• Enjoy taking initiative to solve open-ended problems

Bonus Points

• Experience as an educator, and educational writer and a demonstrated passion for helping people learn
• Experience working in or managing open-source communities
• Experience with developer relations or developer support
• Experience with fully remote, distributed organizations
• Familiarity with decentralized building blocks (blockchain, DHTs, smart contracts, p2p networking, etc

What is Bacalhau?

The purpose of the Bacalhau Project (https://bacalhau.org) is to provide a platform for public, transparent, and optionally verifiable computation. Bacalhau enables users to run arbitrary docker containers and wasm images as tasks against data stored in IPFS. This architecture is also referred to as Compute Over Data (or CoD). Bacalhau is a new way to run any computation on decentralized data. There is no need to move large datasets & all languages/data are supported, making it available to anyone working with large data.

What’s it like to work at Protocol Labs? Protocol Labs' mission is to improve humanity’s most important technology, the Internet. We build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how it works. Today, we are focused on how we store, locate, and move information. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and more. As a distributed team, we hire anywhere in the world, and at various levels of experience (entry, senior, staff). We look for people with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds. We have a great benefits package, including parental leave, contributions to your retirement, competitive pay, and unlimited time off. For U.S.-based employees, we also provide platinum-level health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family.

If you’re passionate about the future of computing and a more democratized internet, we want to talk to you.

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