Engineering Manager - Solutions Engineering

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is very widely used in breakthrough enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. Our customers include the world's leading public cloud and silicon providers, and industry leaders in many sectors. The company is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1200+ colleagues in 75+ countries and very few office-based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder-led, profitable, and growing.

We want to transform the world of software operations by enabling true model-driven operations via next-generation infrastructure-as-code. This will allow companies to run very efficient bare-metal operations for high-performance computing, private cloud, data lakes, AI/ML, and analytics. We need to invent some new technology, and we need to build some new products; we are therefore looking for someone who can lead and inspire a regional software engineering team to fulfill this initiative.

The Solutions Engineering team works in close collaboration with our managed infrastructure operations team, which runs many private OpenStack clouds and Kubernetes clusters for customers around the world. This enables us to improve our infra-as-code products based on our own real experience, mirroring that of our users and customers. We work in Python, creating open-source automation capabilities that simplify operations for anybody, anywhere, who is building on Ubuntu.

Most of the team's work involves pure Python software development focused on enabling true DevOps workflows. We strive for high quality in both design, documentation, tests, and performance as we enhance operations code packages and Ubuntu itself in order to ensure our platform is the easiest, most robust, and best performing for driving your infrastructure.

As an Engineering Manager, your primary responsibility is to the people you lead and support: ensuring that they are growing as engineers, doing valuable work, and finding satisfaction in their career at Canonical. We need someone who can display technical leadership by leveraging a solid background in software development so that they're able to challenge and grow their team members. You will have the opportunity to influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on direction and execution.

What you will do

Lead and develop a team of Python engineers working remotely in global locations

Hiring, coaching, mentoring, feedback, and hands-on career development

Demonstrate sound engineering principles by directly contributing code yourself

Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects

Set and manage expectations with other engineering and operations teams

Coordinate with management and internal and external stakeholders or customers

Advocate for modern, agile software development practices

Help develop and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices

Grow a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the company values

Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation

Travel globally up to 10% of time 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 agile software development

You love leading, coaching, and mentoring software developers - especially Python ones

You are knowledgeable in cloud computing concepts & technologies

You are comfortable administrating Linux servers, including their storage and networking