Software Engineer — Technical Documentation Contributor (Contract, Remote)

Specific Specialists works with experienced engineers to build high-quality datasets of human-authored technical writing.

About the role

We're looking for software engineers and data scientists to contribute the kind of documents you already write at work — the ones where you reason through a problem before anyone writes code. We want documents that show your thinking, not documents that describe a finished system.

Documents that fit

• Design docs and RFCs where you weighed multiple approaches and picked one
• Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) with the rationale spelled out
• Technical proposals and system design write-ups
• PRDs and scoping documents with tradeoffs and non-goals
• Migration plans, including what could go wrong and how you'd handle it
• Postmortems and incident write-ups with real root-cause reasoning
• Build-vs-buy analyses and technology evaluations
• Experiment design docs and analysis write-ups (for data scientists)
• Capacity, reliability, or performance planning docs

Documents that don't fit

• Source code, or documentation auto-generated from code
• API reference pages, changelogs, or release notes
• Blog posts, tutorials, or conference talks
• Anything written primarily by an AI tool

What makes a strong submission

• You were the author or the primary author
• 3–10 pages of substantive content
• It reads like a real working document — assumptions, open questions, disagreement, revision marks, and rough edges are all welcome
• The reasoning is visible: what you considered, what you rejected, and why

Pay

$20 per accepted document. We review submissions within 1 day and give specific feedback rather than silently rejecting work. Contributors who consistently submit strong documents are invited into ongoing, higher-volume projects.