Principal Technical Writer - Customer Onboarding

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale , unleashing the potential of businesses and people.

We are looking for a Principal Technical Writer to lead the strategy and execution of our customer onboarding and 'Getting Started' content. Your mission is to transform our onboarding materials into a cohesive, narrative-driven experience that guides users to their first 'aha!' moment. You will partner closely with the Self-Service (SSC) team, acting as a bridge between the field, product, and documentation to ensure our content is not just accurate, but effective at guiding trial-to-paid conversion.

Responsibilities

• Drive the onboarding content strategy. Define and execute a cohesive narrative for how users learn to use our products, ensuring a seamless story from the first visit to successful deployment.
• Align Field, Product, and Docs. Act as a central point of contact for stakeholders. Work with Product teams to understand roadmap changes, Field teams to identify friction points in real-world deployments, and Documentation teams to ensure high-quality content output.
• Design user-focused flows. Create organized onboarding experiences. These should highlight best practices, troubleshooting, and clear next steps. Avoid confusing 'choose-your-own-adventure' methods.
• Measure and Iterate. Use user research, support feedback, and telemetry to identify where users stall and iterate on content to reduce churn and improve time-to-first-value.

Requirements

• 7+ years of relevant experience. Experience in technical writing or developer-focused roles, with a proven track record in onboarding or user journey design.
• Cross-functional leadership. Proven ability to lead initiatives and influence stakeholders across product, engineering, and sales/field organizations.
• Deep narrative skills. Experience in creating compelling, cohesive stories for complex technical products.
• Data-driven mindset. Comfortable using analytics, UXR, and support data to inform documentation decisions and prioritize work.
• Collaborative spirit. Experience working in large, distributed organizations where alignment across multiple teams is critical to success.
• Customer knowledge. Experience with self-service cloud products as a user or practitioner, with an understanding of how customers onboard, evaluate, and adopt technical tools.

Benefits

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave