Engineering Manager - App Stores

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.

This is a technical management role to lead a team that develops Python and Golang micro-services that power our global software distribution engine. The world sees it as the Snap Store and Charmhub.io marketplaces, behind the scenes it is a unified system that understands key concepts in software distribution - architectures, releases, betas, release candidates, stable releases, branches and more. We are on a journey to transform the experience that people all over the world have with their open source software by significantly expanding the range of software we can deliver through this system. If you have a passion for clean APIs, believe that great engineers ship software calmly and regularly against an agile plan, and know that tests are the key to higher velocity and reliability, you'll fit right in.

This is a great opportunity to take part in engineering a highly scalable SaaS product (think about the load on our systems when one of our largest Ubuntu Desktop snaps is updated by the publisher, for instance). In addition, you will have the opportunity to learn from Canonical's world-class security team as we work collectively to deliver this capability, safely, to our customers around the world.

As an Engineering Manager at Canonical, you must be technically strong, but your main responsibility is to run an effective team and develop the colleagues you manage. You will develop and review code as a leader, but know that the best way to improve the product is to ensure that the whole team is focused, productive and unblocked. You are expected to help them grow as engineers, do meaningful work, do it outstandingly well, find professional and personal satisfaction, and work well with colleagues and the community. You will also be expected to be a positive influence on culture, facilitate technical delivery, and regularly reflect with your team on strategy and execution. You will collaborate closely with other Engineering Managers, product managers, and architects, producing an engineering roadmap with ambitious and achievable goals.

We expect Engineering Managers to be fluent in the programming language, architecture, and components that their team uses. Code reviews and architectural leadership are part of the job. The commitment to healthy engineering practices, documentation, quality and performance optimisation is as important, as is the requirement for fair and clear management, and the obligation to ensure a high-performing team.

This is a great opportunity to really learn how to do engineering of a highly-scalable SaaS product (think about the load on our systems when one of our largest Ubuntu Desktop snaps is updated by the publisher, for instance). In addition, you will have the opportunity to learn from Canonical's world-class security team as we work collectively to deliver this capability, safely, to our customers around the world.

Location : This role may be based remotely in the Americas, Europe, Middle East or Africa time zones.

What your day will look like

Lead a remote team of engineers in your time zone

Develop talent through coaching, mentoring, feedback, and hands-on career development

Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, management, and external stakeholders

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

With your team, build clean web service APIs to support both CLI and web frontend clients, using Python (and optionally Golang).

Engage with many other teams at Canonical, as well as the open-source community and commercial partners

What we are looking for in you

Good experience in leading modern, agile software development practices

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

Demonstrative experience of being a role model for sound engineering principles and directly contributing toward your team's goals

Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events

You love to mentor, develop and grow people, and have a track record of doing it

You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development

You are focused on success and the timely delivery of high-quality software

You value and nurture great team culture and spirit