Summary of the Sr. Technical Writer, Mission Autonomy job at Anduril Industries

Company Overview

Anduril is a defense technology company, bringing Silicon Valley talent and funding to the defense sector. Our technology helps our customers solve their toughest challenges by enabling them to make better, more informed decisions in life-and-death situations. We’ve assembled a diverse team of experts in artificial intelligence, computer vision, sensor fusion, optics, and data analysis that are creating software and hardware solutions to radically evolve the capabilities of the United States and our allies. If you are passionate about solving problems that have real impact, come join Anduril and build the future of defense.

Team Overview

Anduril’s Mission Autonomy team builds the software ecosystem used to command and control collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). Our software is deployed both onboard air vehicles and within operator-controlled Ground Control Stations, and it supports the complete “Day-in-the-Life” of these vehicles: operator training, mission planning, mission execution, and mission debrief. Our software is deliberately built to be agnostic to any single air vehicle or software platform, and it is integrated against government reference architectures and interfaces so that it can operate across a competitive vendor ecosystem. Our responsibilities include autonomy software development, air vehicle and ground system integration, flight test support, and the technical documentation that lets operators, integrators, and developers use our autonomy stack correctly. We are seeking an experienced senior technical writer to build and maintain autonomy software documentation in accordance with program and customer requirements. We believe that the quality of our documentation should reflect the quality of our products, which are world-class.

Role Specifics

As a senior technical writer, your mission is to partner with our autonomy, platform integration, and flight test teams to deliver accurate, updated, and easy-to-understand documentation on how to integrate, configure, and operate Anduril’s Mission Autonomy software. You will do whatever it takes to organize our engineering and program delivery functions in this mission. In this role, you will work closely with engineers, autonomy behavior developers, test engineers, and various subject matter experts to understand our software, identify integrator and operator workflows, and use documentation to close the gap. As such, the technical writer will play a foundational role in setting the bar for tone, voice, and quality across our written artifacts.

With Anduril’s focus on defense and national security, autonomy documentation plays a critical role in ensuring operators in every role, from Air Vehicle Controller to Quarterback, understand how our autonomy behaves across its operating modes, what it will and will not do on its own, and how to task, override, and approve its actions. Your mission is to make the process of learning how to employ autonomous systems as easy and seamless as possible, with exceptionally written and presented artifacts.

You will identify relevant stakeholders and lead them through a documentation roadmap with established key milestones and targets. This will require an in-depth understanding of what teams are relevant to documentation, and what an organized effort toward collaboration entails. You are to ensure that stakeholders are engaged at the right time, and you will guide them towards a finished user-facing document that plainly meets customer needs. Finally, you will work with our account teams to ensure that contract deliverables are accurate, on time, and in the right format, including documentation that must align to government reference architecture releases and flight test event schedules.

Written content artifacts under this charter may include things like: mission planning, execution, and debrief user guides; autonomy task and behavior overviews; deployment, configuration, and management manuals; message and API reference catalogs; architecture and design documents; integration and test procedures; flight manual and checklist inputs; glossaries; and release notes. You will partner with ILS, product, and engineering teams across all phases of product development to ensure users have the right documentation available, including the third-party air vehicle and ground control vendors who integrate against our autonomy interfaces.

Another critical aspect of this role is to build the infrastructure and tooling needed for creating and maintaining our documentation content at scale. This role spans two authoring environments, and you will be fluent in both. Internally, we run a docs-as-code pipeline so that technical documentation stays aligned with engineering. For customer and contract deliverables, we author structured content in S1000D using RapidAuthor against our Common Source Data Base. A significant part of your charter is keeping these two environments coherent, so that engineering-authored source content flows into formal deliverables without being rewritten from scratch. This structure will enable technical writing contributions from elsewhere across the business. In this role, you will co-lead efforts to define requirements, identify software solutions, and then implement them while also building process and training to scale this function across other teams.

What you’ll do

• Generate, review, and edit documentation that is user-focused. Work with engineering and test to deliver task, conditions, standard-centric documentation
• Document autonomy behaviors, operating modes, and failure and contingency handling so that users and integrators can predict system response, and keep that documentation current as behaviors change release over release
• Own interface and message reference documentation for the autonomy stack, working from government reference interface definitions, protobuf and schema definitions, and the source code itself, and support vendor integration events with clear, testable interface documentation
• Produce developer and integrator reference material that is accurate to the implementation, including architecture and design documents, sequence and state diagrams, and configuration references
• Contribute to Anduril’s technical writing toolkit - working on everything from style guides to the documentation lifecycle and review process, and also relevant software tool procurement through definition requirements for things like authoring and publishing tools, spanning both our internal docs-as-code pipeline, including its static site generator, search, linting, and CI deployment, and our S1000D authoring and publishing environment
• Run the intake and triage path for documentation requests from across the program, and keep the published site accurate, navigable, and current release over release
• Evaluate and prioritize tasks required to successfully support product documentation efforts and keep them on track. Help drive the best decision for the company by using a data-driven approach and consider input from stakeholders to ensure well-informed decisions. You should be prepared to fill gaps that represent risks to the documentation roadmap
• Communicate and help manage expectations. Ensure risks are noted with adequate time, mitigations are identified, and resources are allocated
• Support flight test and demonstration events by capturing procedures, configuration baselines, and lessons learned, and by turning test results into documentation updates
• Help build a culture of technical documentation by creating process and training for others to contribute content. Refine our product maturity framework so that documentation is a meaningful step towards productization of new systems.

Required Qualifications

• 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, and 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)

Preferred Qualifications

• 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