Technical Writer (CBP)

About the role

Clearance: Active CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD strongly preferred. We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold one.

Citizenship: U.S. Citizenship required

Location: Ashburn, VA

Salary Range: [Pending]

Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.

Travel: Rare, as needed

The Role

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 A document that is out of date does more damage than no document at all, because somebody will trust it.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.

Two things are worth knowing before you apply. 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.

What Success Looks Like

• Objective 1: In the first 90 days, find out which documents people actually use and which they have quietly stopped trusting
• You can name the documents an engineer opens during an incident, and the ones they skip and why.
• You have mapped what exists against what the program is required to produce.
• You have stopped maintaining at least one thing nobody reads.
• Objective 2: By month six, cut the time engineers spend answering the same question twice
• Questions that used to route to one specific person get answered by something findable.
• New team members reach useful work without booking time with whoever holds the knowledge.
• A search for a current procedure returns the current version rather than three candidates.
• Engineers send people to the documentation instead of explaining it again themselves.
• Objective 3: Get deliverables through review without a rework cycle
• Documents required by the contract arrive complete and on schedule.
• Reviewers ask about substance rather than returning things over format and completeness.
• Handling and marking requirements are correct before a document leaves the team.
• Objective 4: Leave a documentation practice that keeps up with a system that changes
• Updating the document is part of making the change rather than something that happens afterward, if anyone remembers.
• Content that has gone stale is visible as stale rather than quietly wrong.
• Templates and standards exist that other people follow, so quality does not depend on who happened to write it.

Preferred Experience

• You have documented technical systems you were not an expert in, and can describe how you got up to speed.
• You have worked on a federal program and know in practice what handling controlled information requires.
• You have built documentation standards that outlasted your own involvement.
• You have gotten busy engineers to contribute to documentation without having any authority over them.
• You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.
• You work fluently in Markdown, Confluence, SharePoint, and a standard document toolchain.
• A portfolio of documents people actually used tells us more than a certification does.
• A note on timing

• We are staffing this program now.
• If you already hold an active CBP BI and EOD, your start date is short and a $10,000 signing bonus comes with the role, payable after 90 days under standard terms.
• We would like to talk this week.

• If you do not, we can begin processing a CBP BI for you.
• That takes months rather than weeks, so applying now means joining a pipeline rather than starting immediately.
• We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out after you apply.

Employee Benefits

Agile's benefits offerings include, dependent upon position, Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, Holiday Pay, short-term and long-term Disability, Retirement and Learning and Development opportunities as well as other optional benefit elections.