BRIAN SHEEHAN

Senior Technical Writer

Reno, Nevada | (775) 203-2196 | brian.d.sheehan@greyhawk.ch | linkedin.com/in/brian-d-sheehan/

Professional Summary

Senior Technical Writer who documents the surfaces other developers build against: the partner integration ecosystem at Atlassian, the plugin SDK and platform APIs at Rapid7. Works in Git and Markdown, and generates API reference from the OpenAPI spec. Has written onboarding guidance as configuration, updating the JSON behind automated setup wizards. Builds Claude skills and research workflows into the documentation toolchain.

Core Competencies

• Documentation Delivery: Docs-as-code, Git, GitHub, Markdown, pull request review, publish-on-merge pipelines, terminology and style standards, and information architecture
• Developer Documentation: REST API reference, OpenAPI, SDK and plugin documentation, Atlassian Forge and Connect, authentication and credential flows, service-user provisioning, JSON and YAML configuration, developer onboarding, and open-source contribution workflows
• AI and Tooling: Claude skills and projects, LLM research workflows, and current LLM harnesses
• Domain: Security tooling, covering vulnerability management, SIEM, application security, security orchestration and automation, and multi-cloud posture management (AWS, Azure, GCP). Open-source and integration ecosystems
• Practice: SME interviewing, cross-functional partner enablement, regulated-sector review (healthcare, financial services), and writing for mixed technical audiences

Professional Experience

Atlassian (Remote)

Senior Technical Writer | June 2021 – June 2026 (5 years)

• Owned product and developer documentation for the partner integration ecosystem, the platform behind a Marketplace of roughly 8,000 apps from about 1,800 partners. Those partners came from healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries, and each arrived with its own review constraints and security requirements.
• Moved the documentation set onto a docs-as-code pipeline: Markdown in GitHub, review by pull request, and a publish-on-merge pipeline. Paired it with a review path that put each surface in front of the engineers who owned it. Review stopped queueing behind one writer.
• Documented the Connect-to-Forge transition, from Forge's 2021 general availability through the staged end-of-support milestones that gave every Connect app a deadline to move. The documentation had to serve partners at very different points in that migration, from evaluating to mid-rewrite.
• Rewrote onboarding guidance as configuration rather than prose, updating the JSON behind Atlassian's automated setup wizards. The written docs and the in-product walkthrough had been maintained separately until then, and they disagreed.
• Documented the partner onboarding path as one continuous sequence: service-user creation, API credential issuance and rotation, scope and permission configuration, and what breaks at each step when it is done wrong.
• Generated REST API reference and SDK documentation from the OpenAPI specification. The reference moved when the spec did.
• Ran SME interviewing for the platform. Most of what mattered lived in the heads of engineers who had neither the time nor much incentive to explain it, and structured interviews were how it got out and became instructions a reader could follow.
• Wrote the same feature twice for readers at opposite ends of technical ability: an administrator who has never seen an API, and a developer integrating against it.
• Built Claude skills, projects, and research workflows into the documentation practice. A skill packages house standards and review criteria for whoever is drafting. The same workflows carry over to the other current LLM harnesses.

Rapid7 (Remote)

Senior Technical Writer | December 2019 – March 2021 (1 year 3 months)

Technical Writer | May 2017 – December 2019 (2 years 7 months)

• Owned developer documentation for InsightConnect, Rapid7's security orchestration and automation product. That covered the Python plugin SDK, the YAML plugin specification, and the icon-plugin CLI that external developers use to scaffold, build, and test integrations locally.
• Wrote the plugin development path from spec file through triggers and actions, Docker image build, local runs against JSON test fixtures, and the review criteria a plugin has to meet before it lands in the public repository.
• Documented the Insight Platform REST APIs across InsightVM, InsightIDR, and InsightAppSec, which share one authentication model. Covered key generation and rotation, regional endpoint selection, and the error each misconfiguration returns.
• Reviewed documentation by pull request in the same repository as the plugin code, alongside community contributors.
• Held the module documentation standard for Metasploit Framework, where modules arrive from external security researchers rather than staff. The standard and the msftidy checks are what a contribution is measured against before a maintainer looks at it.
• Explained vulnerability management, SIEM, and application security to two audiences: the engineer configuring a scan, and the developer consuming its output.
• Promoted to Senior in December 2019, taking on information architecture plus terminology and style standards across the Insight product line and the review path for content contributed by engineers and external plugin authors. Documented DivvyCloud after the May 2020 acquisition, folding multi-cloud posture management for AWS, Azure, and GCP into a platform documentation set that had not been built to hold it.

Education

Bachelor of Arts | University of Nevada, Las Vegas