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. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter.

What Is the Role

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. In this role, you will define the narrative architecture of our user journey, ensuring that every touchpoint, from first-time setup to advanced feature adoption, feels like a seamless, intentional story.

What You Will Be Doing

• 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 that 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.

What You Bring

• 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.

Our docs team helps shape the evolution of our products and services. We care deeply about giving you ownership of what you're working on. We believe Elastic achieves greatness when you are free to pursue your ideas and are surrounded and challenged by your peers.

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. We strive to have parity of benefits across regions: competitive pay, health coverage in many locations, flexible calendars and schedules, generous vacation days, donation matching, volunteer time, and a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.