Docs Team Lead - Payabli

Payabli is the Intelligent Fintech Operating System for software platforms, giving software companies PayFac capabilities through a single developer-friendly API spanning Pay In, Pay Out, and Pay Ops.

About the Role

Payabli’s docs are how partners integrate with us. We want Payabli to be the easiest payments company to integrate with, and documentation is a big part of that. We’re a small, high-ownership team situated alongside Product and Engineering. We treat documentation as a product, writing for humans and for the AI agents developers now build with.

As Docs Team Lead, you’ll set the direction for our developer and product docs. You’ll lead a team of two technical writers and stay hands-on. You’ll write, review, build tooling, and own the API reference. This is a player-coach role where you can expect to spend about three-quarters of your time on technical work and a quarter leading the team.

You will report directly to the CTO in this remote role.

What You’ll Do

Lead the Team

• Manage and mentor two skilled technical writers. Hold 1:1s, develop careers, and keep ownership areas clear.
• Trust people to own their work, unblock them quickly, and protect the team from burnout.
• Run team rituals, including quarterly goal setting, backlog grooming, PTO/coverage plans, and culture initiatives like writing workshops and blog posts.

Own the Developer Docs

• Own the OpenAPI 3.1 reference for our embedded payments API across Pay In, Pay Out, and Pay Ops.
• Own information architecture, docs CI/CD, style guides, and linting rules.
• Integrate AI agents into your daily workflow with human review gates on everything produced.
• Help review PRs touching docs prior to subject matter expert review, acting as the final human quality gate.

Run Docs Operations

• Triage incoming engineering and product work daily, converting tasks into docs tickets with clear priorities and ship dates.
• Ship docs alongside every monthly production release, including API changelogs, release notes, and launch documentation.
• Hold the team to published SLAs and release tiers while keeping stakeholders informed.

Own Agentic Resources

• Own our public agent skills plugin used by partners' coding agents, keeping it accurate as the API changes via evals.
• Own the skills, agent instructions, and agent tooling used internally by the Docs team.

Measure and Report

• Publish a monthly State of the Docs report derived from product analytics, AI chat, and search data.
• Track team velocity, post-release docs work, and AI answer coverage while setting clear improvement targets.

What You Bring

Must Have

• 8+ years in technical writing or developer documentation with real API reference experience.
• Experience leading or mentoring technical writers.
• Deep OpenAPI experience plus docs-as-code workflows with Git, pull requests, CI, and Markdown/MDX.
• Ability to read API responses, write scripts (TypeScript or Python), and build docOps tools.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents in a docs workflow and strong judgment on their failure modes.
• Rigorous verification habits with clear, async-first written communication.

Nice to Have

• Payments or fintech experience (card processing, ACH, payouts, merchant onboarding).
• Experience with Fern or similar docs and SDK platforms.
• A portfolio site demonstrating API docs you wrote and docs tooling you built.

How the Docs Team Works

• Users First: Docs help partners integrate smoothly and get back to their core work.
• Safe Hands: High dependability—we verify details and flag uncertainties.
• Written & Async by Default: Questions live in public channels; feedback happens in PRs and tickets.
• Ownership over Approval: Writers own their areas; the lead sets direction and unblocks.
• Sustainable Pace: We prioritize sustainable workflows over burnout.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Stock options with potential for additional equity as the company scales
• Flexible PTO and paid parental leave
• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• 401(k), HSA, and pre-tax savings programs