We are looking for
The Open Home Foundation is seeking a passionate technical writer, based in Europe, to join our Home Assistant department as a full-time Senior Technical Writer. This team is responsible for the open development, maintenance, and enhancement of the Home Assistant platform; supporting new functionality aligned with our roadmap and enabling the wider community to contribute and innovate easily.
In this role, you will act as both writer and planner: setting documentation priorities and processes, assisting in coordinating work, and still producing content yourself. You will help shape how we create, maintain, and scale documentation, guiding both our internal team and community contributors.
What you are going to do
- Assist in leading the strategy and structure of Home Assistant documentation, ensuring consistency and clarity across the ecosystem.
- Define documentation priorities and keep the content roadmap aligned with project goals.
- Write and maintain technical documentation yourself, with a focus on complex topics like hardware integrations, installation, and advanced features.
- Create, assign, review, and coordinate documentation tasks across the Home Assistant documentation team and work closely with the community.
- Develop scalable processes for planning, writing, reviewing, maintaining documentation, and handling user feedback.
- Mentor other writers and contributors, providing feedback and ensuring high quality.
- Collaborate closely with engineers and product teams to ensure documentation is accurate and user-friendly.
- Set up and maintain your own Home Assistant test environment to try out features, integrations, and hardware in order to produce accurate and practical documentation.
What you need to have
- 5+ years of technical writing experience, with at least 2 years in a senior, lead, or planning role.
- Proven ability to set documentation priorities and manage content roadmaps.
- Experience with topic-oriented writing for software products.
- Strong experience working effectively in a remote, asynchronous environment where written communication drives collaboration.
- Strong problem-solving abilities, attention to detail, and ability to work independently.
- Ability to mentor and review the work of other writers.
- Affinity with developer tooling commonly used for documentation at the Open Home Foundation, such as Visual Studio Code, git, and GitHub.
- Professional Fluency in English: Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
- European Residency: You must be currently based and eligible to work within Europe.
It would be great if you also have
- Familiarity with terminology work.
- A passion for smart homes and automation.
- Experience with Home Assistant as a user or contributor.
- Affinity with open-source development philosophy.
- Experience contributing to open-source projects, ideally including Home Assistant or related projects.
- Awareness of how modern AI tools can be used to improve workflows or team efficiency.
What we offer you
The Open Home Foundation is a fully remote organization that uses Remote to employ people from all over the world. You will be a normal salaried employee in your country.
This is a full-time position for 40 hours per week. Because we are a fully remote company, there is no fixed schedule. For the purpose of team communication, we do try to ensure at least 3 hours of overlap in the workday. You will report to the Home Assistant Lead, who is based in the Netherlands.
Core to the establishment of the Open Home Foundation was the well-being of the people building the future of the smart home. We will provide all the benefits required by the country you reside in. However, we also want to make sure all our employees, regardless of country of origin, get at least a minimal set of benefits, including:
- Five weeks (twenty-five days) of paid time off.
- Fourteen days of paid sick leave if your country/laws treat them as unpaid.
- Six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid parental leave to be used in the first year after birth. We will provide the missing days if your country/laws do not provide such compensation.
- A budget for your work hardware once you start. After three years, you may keep this equipment for personal use.
- An annual smart home budget to ensure you keep up-to-date with the latest that smart homes offer.
- A 50% contribution to your internet connection fee at your home workspace.
- One day every two weeks to work on your personal projects.
- If you are currently working on Home Assistant-related side projects, you can spend work time maintaining them.
When first offering a position to a new member, the Open Home Foundation aims to provide a total compensation package that matches the 75th percentile for the new hire's role, seniority, and local market rates. For a Senior Technical Writer in our primary operating countries, the approximate yearly compensation will be the following:
- Netherlands:80.000 EUR
- UK: 73.000 GBP
- Spain: 62.000 EUR
- Portugal: 61.000 EUR
- Other countries: Compensation can be discussed during the first interview.
These figures may be adjusted based on experience, qualifications, and work hours.
About us
The Open Home Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Switzerland, with the objective of fighting for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. It does this by supporting the development of open-source projects, and open connectivity and communication standards.
A big part of this is Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/, the biggest https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/#the-state-of-open-source open-source project in number of contributors, but the Open Home Foundation also owns or collaborates with other projects important to promoting privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home, like:
- Open hardware tools (e.g., ESPHome https://esphome.io/, ESP Web Tools https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/).
- Open standards (e.g., Python Matter Server https://github.com/home-assistant-libs/python-matter-server, Z-Wave JS https://github.com/zwave-js, ZigPy https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy, BTHome https://bthome.io/, Improv Wi-Fi https://www.improv-wifi.com/).
- Open voice (e.g., Rhasspy https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy, Wyoming Protocol https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wyoming/, Piper https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).
- Music Assistant https://www.music-assistant.io/.
The recruitment process
1. Apply for the role.
2. Our HR team will review your application with the hiring manager.
3. Interview with HR.
4. Technical assessment.
5. Interview with the team & manager
6. Offer.
7. Join our team!
The recruitment process
- Standard stuff; name, ed.
- Are you a Home Assistant user? If so, please tell us about your smart home setup
- Ask for the tools
- Do you have experience with terminology work, to which extend?
- Have you have done structured documentation, which standard(s) did you use?