In this senior leadership role, you will be responsible for systems of record that are critical to operations of our company and for integrations that enable commercial engagement with Canonical by the broader Ubuntu user base.

As an engineering director at Canonical your primary responsibility is to the people you support: ensuring that they are growing as engineers, doing valuable work, and generally having a great time at Canonical. As a lead for strong engineers, technical leadership and a solid background in software development is a must, so that you’re able to challenge and grow your team members. You will have the opportunity to influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution.

The role will appeal to an experienced engineering lead with both technical and commercial aptitude and interests.  Canonical sustains itself by delivering commercial products on top of our many platforms including Ubuntu, the #1 operating system for the cloud.  In this role, you will have the opportunity to partner with our business leaders internally to enable their projects to be possible.  You will also have the chance to work with industry leading technology companies on an ever increasing range of projects with Ubuntu in their environments.

What you’ll do

• You will build and lead a globally distributed team of engineers through hiring, coaching, mentoring, feedback and hands-on career development
• You will demonstrate sound engineering principles by directly contributing toward your team’s goals
• Support timely delivery of technical solutions to address business needs
• Effectively set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, senior management, and external stakeholders
• Advocate and advance modern, agile software development practices and help develop and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation
• Exercise commercial and technical awareness in negotiation with vendors, and in selection of new SAAS platforms
• Work from home with global travel up to 20% for internal and external events

Who you are

• You love developing and growing people and have a track record of doing it
• You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development
• You have experience in leading, managing, coaching and mentoring software developers to deliver timely, high quality software
• You have experience working in an agile development environment
• You have experience in automating the software product lifecycle with tools like Juju, Charms, Helm, Terraform, Ansible, etc.
• You have experience in commercial enablement at software companies
• You are comfortable with REST, gRPC, SAML, OATH and other integration mechanisms 
• You have familiarity with SalesForce or Dynamics, and in integrating these tools with external systems
• You are broadly familiar with public cloud operations on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud

The company expects leaders to gather quarterly on a global basis, which implies intercontinental travel regardless of work location. In addition, this team will be distributed, and many partnerships or suppliers will be global rather than local providers, requiring additional travel.

Candidates in European and Eastern US time zones will likely find it easier to manage this global responsibility, but the position is open to candidates on a worldwide basis. As a distributed company by design Canonical is comfortable with home office based leadership and sophisticated in its use of technology for distributed teamwork and meetings. Canonical has offices in Austin, Beijing, Boston, London, and Taipei and can provide office space for this role at any of those locations, but office participation is not a requirement.