Joseph Cayouette

I am a Documentation Architect and DocOps engineer with over a decade of experience designing documentation systems that are scalable, reliable, and aligned with modern DevOps practices. At SUSE, I merge technical writing with software engineering to build documentation ecosystems that integrate automation, branding, localization, and SEO into a cohesive workflow.

I pioneered the use of Antora and Asciidoctor at SUSE, creating a modern Docs-as-Code toolchain with Make and GitHub Actions. While many products continue to rely on the established DocBook system, I aided the design and rollout of Antora-based documentation for selected projects, including Rancher and Longhorn, by enabling and guiding teams through migration planning and adoption. My role has been to make it possible for others to succeed with new approaches while respecting existing processes.

My leadership extends beyond tooling. I collaborate closely with product managers, product owners, engineers, and QA to align documentation with product lifecycles and customer needs. I have supervised documentation staff, managed enterprise and open-source documentation releases, and coordinated with third-party vendors to deliver multilingual outputs.

The results of this approach are measurable. I led SUSE’s most successful documentation project, which achieved industry-leading analytics scores: DCI 87/100, QA 98/100, Accessibility 80/100, and SEO 83.9/100—well above industry benchmarks.

I focus on building documentation systems that scale, support business goals, and provide users with information that is accurate, accessible, and trusted.

• Improved collaboration by introducing Antora, Asciidoctor, and Asciidoctor-PDF into the workflow alongside DocBook.
• Supervised and mentored a team of three documentation staff.
• Resolved critical documentation issues by coordinating developers, subject matter experts with field engineers, analyzing customer reports, and validating fixes through QA testing.
• Collaborated with a global team of 43+ engineers on the development of SUSE Manager (now SUSE Multi-Linux Manager) and its upstream open-source project Uyuni.
• Managed and delivered documentation for a global enterprise product used commercially across diverse industries.
• Organized and managed documentation releases for major enterprise branches and maintenance updates.
• Coordinated and delivered open source Uyuni documentation releases, ensuring alignment with community contributions and enterprise needs.
• Packaged and published RPMs for documentation via both the Open Build Service (OBS) and internal build systems.
• Streamlined documentation processes by migrating repositories to GitHub, ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
• Implemented automation pipelines with GitHub Actions for builds, releases, and artifact generation.
• Created a tool to automatically generate last modified metadata for documentation using GitHub commit history.
• Engineered the documentation build backend using Make and Jinja2 templates, integrating Asciidoctor-PDF, Antora, and Asciidoc into a cohesive toolchain.
• Designed and refreshed HTML documentation branding every two years for Uyuni, SUSE Manager, and Multi-Linux Manager.
• Created PDF documentation branding aligned with corporate style guidelines.
• Produced API documentation outputs to support developers and integration teams.
• Utilized Siteimprove to enhance accessibility, SEO, and branding compliance across documentation sites.
• Led SUSE’s top-performing documentation project, earning record-high analytics scores (DCI 87/100, QA 98/100, Accessibility 80/100, SEO 83.9/100), surpassing industry standards.
• Orchestrated localization and translation workflows with Weblate, enabling efficient multilingual documentation.
• Partnered with third-party vendors to manage translation updates and ensure quality across multiple languages.
• Developed a Python-based AI tool to generate SEO-optimized metadata for all SUSE products, improving internal and external search visibility. The tool supported DocBook and Asciidoc/Antora inputs.
• Integrated Lunr.js and customized the search script to display metadata descriptions as search results, rather than default page snippets, improving search relevance.
• Introduced documentation process improvements and established a sustainable branching model for scalable content management.
• Honorable Discharge from the US Military (2004)