Technical Writer (CBP)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. Documentation in an environment like that is not a filing exercise. When something fails at three in the morning at a site nobody can reach quickly, the person working the problem needs a procedure that is correct, current, and findable. A document that is out of date does more damage than no document at all, because somebody will trust it. You are the person who makes that reliable. You will work with network, cloud, security, and field deployment engineers to turn what they know into documentation people use, and carry the program's required deliverables through federal review. The systems will change while you are writing about them, so anything you build has to assume revision rather than completion. And the engineers who hold the knowledge are busy and under change control, which means getting what you need from them is a skill this job depends on more than it depends on prose.

Responsibilities

Work with network, cloud, security, and field deployment engineers to turn what they know into documentation people use; Carry the program's required deliverables through federal review; Build documentation that assumes revision rather than completion; Obtain knowledge from busy engineers under change control; Map existing documents against required program deliverables; Stop maintaining documents nobody reads; Reduce time engineers spend answering repetitive questions; Get deliverables through federal review without rework; Establish documentation standards and templates that keep up with a changing system

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship required

Nice to have

Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred; Documented technical systems you were not an expert in, and can describe how you got up to speed; Worked on a federal program and know in practice what handling controlled information requires; Built documentation standards that outlasted your own involvement; Gotten busy engineers to contribute to documentation without having authority over them; Active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance; Fluent in Markdown, Confluence, SharePoint, and a standard document toolchain; Portfolio of documents people actually used

Benefits

Health Insurance; Life Insurance; Paid Time Off; Holiday Pay; short-term and long-term Disability; Retirement; Learning and Development opportunities; optional benefit elections; $10,000 signing bonus for candidates with an active CBP BI payable after 90 days under standard terms