Lead Instructional Designer / Documentation

About

Swan, a European fintech company, is the easiest way to embed banking features into your product. This can be called “Banking-as-a-Service” or “Embedded banking”. We built Swan so that anyone can start embedding banking features within just minutes of visiting our website. Swan is truly fast and easy to use.

Swan already has 100+ customers across 10+ European countries, large enterprise and startups alike. They include Carrefour, Factorial, Alma, Pennylane and Agicap. We’re on track to take things much, much further, by expanding on Europe — localizing our product, and internationalizing our team and partner portfolio.

Swan has received 58M€ funding from VCs like Lakestar, Accel, and Creandum. We’re a Mastercard principal member and a licensed financial institution, passported across Europe.

With 200+ Swanees across offices in Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, Barcelona and Amsterdam! Wherever you’re coming from, come as you are! We’re open to all kinds of people, from all walks of life. If you’re excited about joining a European fintech adventure, Swan is the way!

To learn more about us: About Swan ; Our story.

Job description

Swan is looking for our Lead Instructional Designer / Documentation. You’ll focus on creating public eLearning experiences for Swan partners, and internal training and documentation to empower our Operations team. Additionally, you will manage our three-person Documentation team, which is responsible for all public documentation and most localization at Swan. This is thus a hybrid role in which you will design and implement an entire part of Swan’s documentation strategy directly and act as a leader for your team.

You’ll be part of the Operations team and report to Maxime, our Chief Services Officer.

Operations is a pillar to Swan’s success, with a mission to provide a flawless end-to-end customer experience, and our docs are a key element of that experience. The Ops team includes Technical Writing, Technical Account Managers, Customer Success, Customer Support, Transactions Monitoring and Know Your Customer (KYC) folks. We are all about customer obsession and making sure Swan offers the smoothest, most elegant Banking-as-a-Service experience out there! We also need to educate our partners on why we need to protect them, Swan, and the end-customers against fraud and money laundering with some of our processes.

✨ Your team

Our Documentation team consists of four people (including you): Coley, our Lead Technical Writer; Mantombi, our Technical Writer; and Carla, our apprentice Localization Project Manager.

As a team, we collaborate with just about the whole company, but we work most with Operations and Product. We maintain two public resources (three with your new project, Swan Academy): Swan’s Documentation and Support Center, as well as specific internal training and documents.

You’re coming into a team that emphasizes empathy, user experience, and being human. We have high expectations because what we publish has the potential to impact the Swan experience for all of our partners and their users. We take that responsibility seriously.

✨ Your mission

• Swan’s partner eLearning resource, Swan Academy, will be your work of art. You’ll take over the project (currently in beta phase) and make it shine.

• Craft training and operational process documentation for internal teams to help team members onboard faster and stay up-to-date on rules and processes.

• Collaborate with teams—a lot. TAM, Ops, Product, Engineering, Marketing, you’ll make all sorts of inquiries and gather information to improve our resources.

• Manage our three-person autonomous Documentation team (estimated 20% of your time).

• Provide input, mentorship, and help to the team on their projects when needed (such as our Support Center), and get their support on future documentation initiatives that will emerge.

• Drive people management initiatives, including hiring, performance reviews, ladder improvement, and employee retention.

Preferred experience

✨ You’re a great match if:

• Experience: You have 5+ years of practical experience as an Instructional Designer or relevant experience in education, technical writing, or another related domain. Experience using different learning platforms and localizing your learning materials would be a bonus. Additionally, you have team management experience, ideally 2-5 years.
• You’re a writer: You geek out over finding just the right words, and you pay attention to minute details most folks miss. You make complex topics easy to understand.
• Collaboration: You’re comfortable reaching out to all kinds of different colleagues. You’re able to understand their unique challenges and figure out together the best way to get things done.
• Systematic: You plan structure in advance and don’t make a mess that you hope to clean up later. Or if that does happen, you really, really care about getting that mess cleaned up.
• Teacher’s attitude: You can turn complex and technical concepts into engaging, clear, and concise educational experiences for our learners.
• Start-up mode: You enjoy working in a challenging, fast-paced, target-driven, and team-oriented environment.
• Languages: Exceptional and polished written English, plus excellent general English skills (you don’t need to be a native speaker). Proficiency in other languages would be a plus, especially if it’s a language we support: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, or Finnish.
• Our ideal teammate: Empathetic. Skilled. Frank. We love to challenge each other, and we leave our egos at the door.

It’s okay if you don’t tick all the boxes — don’t let imposter syndrome prevent you from applying! 🙌

Swan is committed to providing a caring work environment for all employees, regardless of age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, or belief.

When it comes to recruitment, we’re interested in your work experience, skills, and overall personality. Because diversity makes the workplace stronger and is necessary for Swan’s success, we are intensifying efforts to incorporate concrete actions to help us improve in this area.

About Swan

✨ Perks of being a Swanee:

• ESOP packages available 😊
• Hybrid remote policy: We offer the possibility of working from home for 2 days per week.
• The best health insurance: Alan 🦭
• Swan encourages you to have fun staying fit, thanks to partnerships with Classpass & Gymlib.
• We respect your lunch break. Mid-day free-time is sacred and our French office even provides a Swile card to cover your meal on work days. 🥪
• Twice a year we go somewhere gorgeous (a chateau, a mountain) where we reconnect, deep-dive into big topics, and relax.
• This isn’t a perk, it should be the rule, but diversity and inclusion are important at Swan. We’re working hard to get better every day.

✨ Our values:

Swan’s core values guide our actions daily. Individually, they may seem obvious, but together, they form a unique culture.

Simplicity: Leonardo Da Vinci said: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If something's convoluted or confusing, we work extra hard to break it down. - Making complex things simple is what we do.

Long Term: We always play the long game, whether it's to support our partners in their growth journey, or make tangible commitments to climate action.

Excellence: We are a team of experts who consistently go all out to create pixel-perfect banking services and exceed our partners' expectations— whatever it takes.

Be Human: We believe in the power of kindness and the importance of acting with integrity. But embracing our humanity extends beyond interpersonal interactions, it means caring about greater issues that affect our planet.

You can find out more about our culture.

Recruitment process

• A 30-min video call with our Talent Acquisition Manager, to get to know you, understand your career expectations and answer your questions
• An interview with our Chief Service Officer and a case study
• Meet the team
• An interview with our Chief Product Officer