Open Source Stack Software Engineering Lead at Canonical

Job Summary

• This is the central application process for software engineering leadership roles at Canonical and Ubuntu, a new enterprise open-source platform for enterprise, cloud and IoT. If you are excited about the potential that open source has in the enterprise, and you are an expert software engineer capable of providing leadership in any part of the open-source stack, this is the central place to apply at Canonical.
• As a global platform company, we offer a wide range of software engineering challenges, from the Linux kernel up through Ubuntu server, desktop, IoT and operations tooling, from the public cloud to the edge, both open source products and internal commercial business systems.
• We work in low-level engineering with kernels and compilers and toolchains, we work with web technology, and many layers in between. We deliver many kinds of open source, we also build products, tools, and SAAS.
• Our primary software engineering stack is Python, Golang, React, Rust and Kubernetes, but of course, we touch so many levels of the stack that we are also a great home for people with deep skills in C, C++, Bash, HTML, JS, CSS and technical operations.

We are hiring engineering leadership in the following areas:

• Cloud-native development and operations (Docker, Kubernetes, CAAS, PAAS)
• Internet of things technologies and capabilities
• Containerisation and virtualization technologies
• Develops 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 the filesystem to network service
• 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
• We are currently expanding the number of product teams at Canonical to create new products.

As an expert software engineering lead, you may relate to any of the areas of development below:

• On the cloud, we want to offer a full range of open-source databases, message queues, event handling, analytics, big data and identity solutions. Postgres, MySQL, Kafka, HDFS, Spark, Etcd, Redis, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Hadoop and many more are very interesting to us. If you have deep knowledge of any open source database or data store, we likely have a role for you.
• On IoT, we want to expand the range of Linux devices we support and go deep into the embedded world. We're interested in people with deep embedded Linux and RTOS experience, who understand the ARM, RISC-V and X86 architectures deeply, know boot and BIOS processes, and are keen to be part of the future of securely connected things.
• In our SAAS offerings, we are looking for the strong leadership of high-traffic SQL-backed offerings delivering enterprise and consumer capabilities to millions of users and tens of millions of devices.
• Whatever your technical interest, if you find the open-source stack amazing, and you have been a consistent high-performing technical leader in your school, university and career, then this will be a challenging and exciting start to your career at Canonical.
• Applicants are to be interviewed by a senior team at Canonical for technical roles across the company. Successful candidates will be offered a set of engineering leadership opportunities matched to their strengths and interests, to start their career at Canonical.

Qualifications
Exceptional Software Lead:
What will it take to be a technical lead at Canonical?

• To be successful in this application you will need to show proven exceptional results in maths and sciences.
• You must also have proven yourself to be an outstanding software engineer at some layer of the open-source stack.
• This particular Fast Track is for engineers who do not want management responsibility but are strong technical leads - we have separate tracks for folks who want management roles.
• You will need to show that you have a gift for software design and implementation, and enjoy contributing to a highly professional environment with careful choices of technology, architecture, data design, and user interface.
• You should have a broad-based knowledge of Linux, networking, software development, databases, API design and possibly web presentation layers.
• As a leader, you must demonstrate insight into performance and quality engineering practices in your field, and show how you have helped teams embrace effective disciplines on both fronts.
• You also need an understanding of security practices and principles and the impact that engineering choices have on product security.
• We care about how usable our products are, and that starts with documentation. You must have experience producing well-documented products and working with design professionals to shape the product.
• You should 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, architecture, design and mentorship.
• It may require periods of coding to establish key frameworks, APIs or interfaces.
• You should relish the opportunity to write code while being most interested in helping an engineering team produce a great product that will be a pleasure to use and to evolve.