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Software Engineering Director

Home based - Worldwide

This is the Fast Track application process for Engineering Directors at Canonical. We expect engineering leaders at Canonical to be software development experts and, occasionally, practitioners.

As the global platform company behind Ubuntu, we offer a wide range of software engineering challenges. If you are an exceptional engineering manager who is passionate about quality and open source, we can likely find a very interesting product for you to drive.

We work on products across the tech stack - from the Linux kernel up through Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Desktop, and IoT. We prefer to work in Golang, Python and Rust, but we touch many languages as part of Ubuntu. We work on web services, database-driven web services and and cloud operations tooling. We work in low-level engineering with kernels and compilers and toolchains, we work with web technology, and many layers in between. Our products are used by enterprises and developers from the public cloud to the edge, and we work on both open source and commercial code.

We are hiring engineering leadership in the following areas:

  • Cloud native development and operations (Docker, Kubernetes, CAAS, PAAS)
  • Web services and online services - REST APIs and database-driven sites
  • IoT - embedded Linux technologies and capabilities
  • Systems management for IoT devices, desktops, servers and VMs
  • Containerisation and virtualization technologies
  • Devsecops tooling, practices and services
  • Commercial business systems for Canonical itself
  • Data applications from SQL databases to big data
  • AI/ML ops and technologies
  • Robotics and embedded Linux in a wide variety of industries
  • Security offerings, practices and services
  • Storage from raw disk to filesystem to network block and object storage
  • Networking from bare metal to SDN and overlays
  • Distributed systems design and implementation
  • Linux, the kernel and Ubuntu itself
  • Desktop Linux and desktop applications on Windows and macOS
  • Open source community collaboration

Our engineering directors run single products which are delivered across multiple teams. Great directors of engineering work at a higher level, ensuring productivity and satisfaction for the product team, and coordinating across the company. We require extensive engineering experience in director appointments so that decisions and work can be assessed at a technical level, but the mission of a director is to build and develop a group that is highly effective at every level.

We expect  engineering directors to be accountable for the rounded results of their team - not just code, but engagement with the open source community, documentation, quality and product performance and efficiency.

Applications to this Fast Track queue are reviewed by a senior team at Canonical for placements across the company. Successful candidates will be offered a set of engineering director opportunities matched to their strengths and interests to start their career at Canonical.

What makes an exceptional Software Engineering Director at Canonical?

Our best candidates are outstanding at maths and sciences, have built high quality software, gained software engineering management experience and are now looking for a challenging engineering director role running multiple teams at a company that makes mission-critical products for the global market.

A director needs excellent judgement about people - their motivations, abilities, development needs and prospects for success.

Your technology interests may include cloud computing, IoT, web systems, back-end data stores, scale-out infrastructure or Linux itself. You have a gift for software design and implementation, and enjoy a highly professional environment with careful choices of technology, architecture, data design, and user interface. You have broad-based knowledge of Linux, networking, software development, databases, API design and possibly web presentation layers.

You are familiar with the open source environment, and want to build products in partnership with a community.

You can demonstrate insight into performance and quality engineering practices, and you have helped teams embrace effective disciplines on both fronts. You also have an understanding of security practices and principles and the impact that engineering choices have on product security.

You have experience producing well-documented products and working with design professionals to shape the product. You have clearly articulated views on the ways engineering practices influence product outcomes, not just technically but in open source communities and in the marketplace.

It is an advantage to be able to point to open source work of your own which demonstrates these strengths.

This is a role for leadership, management, organization, architecture, design and mentorship, not individual contribution through coding. You should relish the opportunity to shape and direct and develop an engineering team that is happy and brilliant, and produces a product that will be a pleasure to use and to evolve.

In applying for this role you will need to demonstrate both exceptional technical skill, broad based knowledge of the modern open source software arena, proven mathematics or engineering ability, and the ability to articulate ideas and motivate others to embrace your thinking.

Software Engineering Director

Home based - Worldwide


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