Content Engineer (Editorial)

Reporting to Portfolio Director

About Packt

Packt's mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. We are a technical publisher and learning provider with over 400 staff based across the globe, primarily in India and the UK. Our products have global relevance, and our multimedia portfolio includes over 7,000 books, e-books, audiobooks, and video courses. For more details, visit www.packtpub.com.

Within Packt, the publishing business is spread across a number of verticals, each focused on a particular domain. This role is for the Systems Administration & Networking vertical.

About the Systems Administration & Networking Vertical

The Systems Administration & Networking vertical covers the technology domains that keep modern digital infrastructure running: cloud, DevOps, system administration, networking, platform engineering, and the fast-emerging field of AI infrastructure. Our audience is working practitioners such as sysadmins, network engineers, cloud and platform engineers, SREs and DevOps professionals, whose roles are evolving from manual, tool-driven operations toward automation-first, systems-level work. We build learning products that help them make that transition: from managing infrastructure to designing AI-ready platforms, and from following runbooks to integrating AI into everyday workflows like troubleshooting, deployments, observability, and incident response.

Joining this team means shaping content for a market in genuine transition. AI infrastructure engineering is becoming a core skill across SysOps roles, reliability and cost governance are now first-class priorities, and learning itself is shifting toward expert-led, trust-driven formats. You'll work across books, events, newsletters, and community to commission and develop content that meets practitioners where their work is actually heading, and help build one of the most connected learning ecosystems in the infrastructure space.

Role Overview

As a Content Engineer, you will own the content lifecycle for Packt’s technical learning products from concept to publication and beyond. You will be accountable not only for manuscript quality, but also for product information, positioning, derived content opportunities, lifecycle improvements, and evidence-based recommendations that improve content performance. You’ll achieve this through working with external technology authors and content experts, and internal Relationship Leads and Growth Leads, to deliver high-quality, impactful products. You’ll engineer content at every stage: shaping proposals, enhancing structure, coaching authors and ensuring products are updated to meet user needs. Current content products include books, newsletters, event-derived content and derived products, and we are constantly exploring new content forms to meet the needs of tech professionals.

Success in this role means delivering reliable book quality and timeliness, improving the value and performance of assigned products, managing author and expert relationships effectively and contributing to reusable capability across the CE team. The scope, complexity and level of ownership will vary by the level you are hired at, the needs of your vertical and your assigned responsibilities.

Working at Packt – Shaping the Future of Tech Learning

Packt is a digital-first tech publisher on a mission to help the world put software to work. We've recently undergone a company-wide transformation to better serve tech professionals in a rapidly evolving, AI-powered world. Our business is now structured around small, agile vertical teams, each focused on a specific tech domain or topic area, that combine publishing, product, relationship leadership, and marketing capabilities to build tailored content and learning solutions.

This means we move fast, experiment often, and work closely with our audiences to understand what they need. We're looking for people who thrive in a collaborative, entrepreneurial environment and who are motivated by delivering real impact, whether through building innovative products, shaping insightful content, enabling smarter systems and operations, or building and sustaining strong relationships with expert contributors and communities.

If you're excited by meaningful work, curious about how technology is reshaping careers and industries, and want to be part of a mission-led team, Packt could be the right place for you.

What You Will Own

You will own work across five areas:

• Book/Knowledge Quality and Delivery
• Product Ownership and Derived Content
• Author and Expert Relationship Management
• Research, Market Awareness and Lifecycle Health
• Capability, Tools and Process Improvement

What You Will Do

Book/Knowledge Quality and Delivery

• Evaluate proposals and outlines with a focus on audience, JTBDs (Jobs To Be Done) and competitive differentiation.
• Perform substantive edits to strengthen structure, clarity, flow and learning outcomes.
• Ensure content moves beyond tutorials to deliver practical insights, decision-making trade-offs and real-world problem solving.
• Own quality sign-off for every product, ensuring balance between editorial depth and speed-to-market.
• Maintain standards on plagiarism, responsible use of AI-generated content, consistency and readability.

Product Ownership and Derived Content

Some of this work will be assigned as DRI ownership, where you are the Directly Responsible Individual for a product, task or improvement initiative. These are usually separate from core book editorial tasks.

• Identify opportunities to create value from existing and in-development content through derived products, newsletters, short-form assets, interviews and AMAs, soft updates, research explainers, video/audio derivatives and other reusable formats.
• Drive discoverability and title performance by owning PI (Product Information), metadata, and Amazon A+ pages for your products.
• Own or support agreed DRI/product initiatives, with clear outcomes, milestones and evidence of impact.
• Work with Growth Leads, Relationship Leads, Program Managers and Portfolio Directors to connect content quality decisions with audience, positioning, discoverability and product performance.
• Enhance books with extended and multi-format learning, such as MCQs, checklists, interactive labs, visual explainers and quizzes.

Author and Expert Relationship Management

• Manage the content relationship with authors and experts to ensure a productive working experience, strong content outcomes and early escalation of relationship risks.
• Coach authors and experts to sharpen their teaching approach, adapting feedback style to their experience, communication strengths and product needs.
• Work with technical reviewers to ensure accuracy, incorporating their feedback and guiding authors/experts to address comments effectively.

Research, Market Awareness and Lifecycle Health

• Collaborate with Growth Leads and Relationship Leads on book launch and marketing campaigns.
• Proactively research emerging technologies, version updates and industry developments to keep products relevant and competitive.
• Track trends across software languages, frameworks, architecture practices and Gen AI-influenced workflows.
• Apply market intelligence and competitor benchmarking to strengthen positioning and feed insights into product strategy.
• Monitor content health after publication using feedback, reviews, errata, market changes, technical version changes and performance signals.
• Recommend soft updates, new editions, derived assets or positioning changes where evidence shows an opportunity or risk.
• Provide periodic content health checks for the Portfolio Director and Program Manager to support portfolio planning and delivery.

Capability, Tools and Process Improvement

• Use AI and workflow tools responsibly to improve speed, quality and consistency.
• Share useful practices, prompts, templates, playbooks or process improvements with the wider CE group.
• Contribute to team capability through peer support, documentation, demonstrations, pilots or feedback loops.
• Help improve CE workflows by identifying bottlenecks and testing better ways of working.

Who You Are

• A critical thinker who balances editorial precision with big-picture strategy.
• A confident communicator and coach, able to collaborate across functions and articulate editorial decisions clearly.
• A product-minded owner who tracks outcomes, reports progress, uses data/signals, learns from experiments and documents impact.
• Adaptable and comfortable working on both long-cycle books and fast-cycle non-book products.

Must-have skills:

• 3+ years in editorial/content development for technical or instructional products.
• Proven ability to translate complex technical concepts into structured, reader-friendly content.
• Strong author/SME management and feedback skills.
• Excellent English-language proficiency and editorial judgment.
• Quality assurance mindset; confident in making calls on readiness, rework, or cancellation.
• Willingness to own and drive the success of content beyond editing, including multi-format enhancements and derived formats.

Good-to-have skills:

• Familiarity with programming languages or proven interest in tech.
• Experience with multi-format content (events, newsletters, labs, research).
• Awareness of AI tools in editorial workflows or software development contexts.
• Project management experience in balancing multiple priorities.

Why Work at Packt

We are a global and remote-first business with most of our team based in India and the UK. We recognize how important our people are and acknowledge and support the things that are important to them. Our culture is open and informal and based around learning. We love sharing ideas and we want everyone to feel that they have an input into how the business works. We are a fun place to work but with a focus on performance and personal development providing opportunities for personal growth and career progression. We try to achieve this by:

• Ensuring a positive working environment for all team members, supportive of flexible and remote work.
• Supporting individual development through growth opportunities and internal mobility.
• Encouraging social collaboration within teams and communities and knowledge-sharing.
• Fostering a culture that supports a healthy work-life balance.

We focus on the full employee experience. We seek to achieve this by:

• Providing a broad range of benefits and initiatives.
• Advocating a healthy lifestyle where wellbeing is seen as an essential responsibility.
• Celebrating success stories and encouraging peer-to-peer recognition.
• Fostering a culture of self-development.
• Providing a work environment where the best idea wins, and challenges are encouraged.

Benefits:
You will also have access to a range of flexible benefits that are designed to help you make the most of your time with us.

• Bonus scheme
• 5 day workingweek
• 25 days annual holiday (plus bank holidays)
• Flexible hours: choose how, when, and where youwork within India
• Training programs and Certification

Salary Range - INR 55K-85K fixed pay per month (skills and/or experience dependent)

Disclaimer: Packt does not authorize any third-party consultancies, influencers, or agencies to offer employment opportunities on our behalf. We are not involved in any financial transactions with these parties. Our hiring process is managed internally, and all applications should be made through the official procedures outlined in our job listings.