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. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

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. You'll be the champion of the new-user experience, working in lockstep with others to turn technical capability into user success.

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. 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.

What You Bring

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.

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.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

At Elastic, our compensation philosophy aims to provide fair, competitive and transparent remuneration. Salary ranges are established based on a combination of external market benchmarks, internal pay equity considerations, and the responsibilities and complexity associated with each role. This approach helps ensure consistency across comparable roles while remaining competi