Linux Kernel Engineer

This is a general track for applications to any team at Canonical that works with the Linux kernel, across all seniority levels. Apply here if you are an exceptional software engineer who wants to work on both stable and cutting edge Linux kernels for Ubuntu and its wider ecosystem.

Canonical has a large and rapidly growing kernel team that underpins Ubuntu and open source more widely across a very wide range of hardware and use cases. We partner with the biggest kernel contributors - the silicon companies - to ensure that their work reaches the widest possible audience as quickly as possible, with a 10 year enterprise security commitment.

The Canonical Linux Kernel Organization has teams in every time zone. We have opportunities for technical leadership, engineering management, and engineering directorships. The team is responsible for all supported Ubuntu Linux kernels, on all platforms and architectures from small embedded devices to standard desktop/server systems to large scale cloud environments, mainframes and supercomputers.

We care most about hardware and virtualization enablement, security, reliability and performance. There are a number of areas where we lead upstream, but for the most part we are interested in ensuring production readiness and performance for the latest patchsets, rather than subsystem maintenance or evolution.

Kernel Team projects include but are not limited to:

Ubuntu Linux kernel plan, execution, benchmarking and stress testing

Optimised kernels for key silicon and cloud partners

Confidential computing and next-generation security primitives

Developer platforms such as Raspberry Pi and RISC-V

Enabling Ubuntu on a wide range of embedded systems

Kernel Livepatch, which delivers critical kernel fixes without rebooting

FIPS compliance

Real-Time and Low Latency kernel variants and patchsets

Virtualisation or abstraction engines

Container technology

Security with AppArmor, SECCOMP, namespaces and more

Networking - in particular performance and security

Storage - we are particularly interested in Ceph and DRBD

We hire candidates of all experience levels from recent university graduates through seasoned industry experts. We select those who are enthusiastic to work in multiple areas including security mitigation, feature development, patching and test. You must have outstanding academic results, a background in software engineering, be motivated to work in a distributed team and willing to travel globally twice a year for company engineering events.

Location: Working from home, worldwide. We have kernel teams and openings in every time zone and with the notable exception of Taipei, Taiwan, have no offices and therefore no pressure to work from an office.

What your day will look like

Collaborate regularly and proactively with a globally distributed team

Work closely with silicon, cloud, or hardware manufacturers

Diagnose and resolve issues in the kernel