At Camunda, we build products that help customers automate some of the world’s most complex business processes. That sounds simple. It’s not!
Behind the scenes, our engineers are tackling challenges that span distributed systems, long-running workflows, event-driven architecture, and scale across multiple cloud environments. But what sets them apart isn’t just their technical skill, it’s how they think.
In this special “Meet a Camundi” series, we’re spotlighting the engineers behind the platform. You’ll get a window into the problems they’re solving, how they think about system design and debugging, and the mindsets that make them thrive at Camunda.
If you’re the kind of person who loves peeling back the layers of complex systems, who doesn’t wait to be told what to do, and who gets curious about the why, not just the what, you might belong here too!
Read on and find out!
Mark Sellings
My name is Mark, and I’m excited to be the new engineering manager of the Camunda documentation team. I was previously our first senior technical writer, and although I’ll still be contributing directly to our docs, I’m really looking forward to helping drive the Camunda documentation to new levels of excellence. I’ll initially be concentrating on delivering a great docs experience for the Camunda 8.8 release in October, but also identifying what we need to do to best support our customers and community going forward.
What experiences have shaped your career and led you to where you are today?
After graduating with an English degree from King’s College London University, I started as a technical writer at IBM on the South Bank. I previously had no idea that you could learn and create content about technology as a career and was immediately hooked!
During my career, I’ve always been involved in technical writing but have also taken detours into graphic design and web development. This has provided me with a useful set of complementary skills, as technical writing moved away from PDF and printed manuals into delivery via the web. I believe in a very holistic view of documentation, where the final delivery and user experience is just as important as the content itself.
How did you learn about Camunda, and what motivated you to join the team?
Before I joined Camunda, I was working on setting up the developer documentation for the Ardia platform at Thermo Fisher Scientific. I found myself talking to the Camunda documentation team as peers working in a similar field, initially just to share thoughts and ideas. However, the more I learned about Camunda, the more I realized I wanted to be part of such an exciting and cutting-edge company, working with a best-in-class product and helping with such an interesting documentation project.
What do you love most about your role?
As a writer, it is always exciting to work on a truly excellent product like Camunda, and I embrace the collaborative focus we have here, with engineers and writers working closely together to help our users. There are so many interesting areas of the product to write about, even after a year here I feel I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we can do with our documentation.
As I grow into the role of managing our documentation, I’m excited to build up a really high-performing team of writers who can make a massive impact on our documentation and our user experience. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some truly excellent writers and colleagues across documentation teams, and I’ll be trying to put that experience to good use.
This feels like an especially exciting time here at Camunda as we surf what seems to be multiple waves around orchestration and AI. I’m looking forward to making the Camunda docs truly great, and feel genuinely privileged to be able to drive this project forward alongside our phenomenal colleagues and teams.
My main goal is for our documentation to be loved by customers and Camundi, and I’ll be focusing on making sure that happens.
As a fully remote company, Camunda has spent a lot of care creating an intentional remote culture, but “remote culture” can mean a lot of things. What does the remote culture of Camunda mean to you?
I see our remote culture as something to be proud of and celebrate. It means we get the chance to collaborate with excellent people from around the world, all bringing something new with diverse cultures and perspectives. I personally think Camunda does remote working better than anything else I’ve ever experienced, as being able to meet up with your colleagues is so vital to getting true connections at work and allows you to form effective working relationships.
What is a project or idea you’ve worked on at Camunda that you’re particularly proud of?
I really enjoyed working on our intelligent document processing documentation, as I was able to take the docs through from start to finish for this first iteration of the feature. The first wave of our connectors restructure and UX work was a great challenge to figure out, with more work to come in this area.
Since I joined Camunda, I’ve been trying to iteratively level up the UX and general appearance of our docs site as well, and have made many small improvements such as adding dark mode and other general styling changes.
Who has been a role model or mentor in your career, and what impact did they have on you?
I have been lucky enough to work with some truly great writers and people from other divisions over the years, too many to name!
It’s really important to stay humble and be a sponge—I’ve picked up so many lessons from observing how other writers work and solve challenges. Our Camunda developer experience (now docs) team has really shown me what a highly collaborative team can look like, a culture I’m hoping to foster and improve on as we continue to grow our docs team.
What excites you the most outside of your work?
I have always enjoyed playing football, so that is definitely something I would struggle to be without, but I guess being able to enjoy the outdoors with my friends and family is probably my favorite pastime. I also drum in a band, mostly rock/indie and covers, though I’ve always wanted to learn jazz drumming.
Lightning round:
What’s something your team builds that people outside your domain often underestimate?
- I don’t think you should ever underestimate the importance of good documentation. Imagine getting a flat-pack wardrobe without instructions, for example. Documentation is vital for something as technical as Camunda, and people may not realize how much work besides writing actually goes into producing a single document page.
- I’ve always loved the Exact Instructions Challenge PB&J edition as a simple introduction to how hard it is to create accurate and user-friendly documentation!
When engineers join your team, where do they typically need to grow most?
- Often I find that technical writers make excellent writers but lack knowledge about the visual side of things. In larger companies you may not need to worry about how your docs will look when delivered, but for most writers you should also be able to craft the user experience (UX), often delivered via the web.
- As the web is a visual medium, having an understanding of web UX concepts and even design can help a technical writer ensure the hard work they put into writing is not wasted in a poorly designed and delivered web UX.
What makes engineering at Camunda feel different from other places you’ve worked?
- The sheer expertise and excellence in the team is definitely something that I love at Camunda; everyone is an expert in their field, and this always forces you to raise your game and keep leveling up—like in football, you improve faster by playing with better players!
One thing you wish more engineers understood?
- The importance of using white space on a page or in a design 😄.
What’s your engineering superpower?
- Having been involved in web and graphic design for a long while (I remember CSS being introduced, using tables before divs, browser wars, and having to design a web page under 100k), I have a very firm understanding of and appreciation for how to deliver web content to users.
Come build with us
The work we do at Camunda isn’t for everyone, but if this kind of thinking energizes you, you’ll likely feel right at home.
We’re looking for engineers who think in systems, who get excited by hard problems, and who care deeply about building tools that other developers love to use.
Want to work with people like Mark? Explore our open roles.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io