Solution Architecture Manager

This is an opportunity to run a field engineering team, helping customers understand and implement Canonical's open source solutions in public clouds and in their own data centers. We work across the entire spectrum of cloud offerings, from Ubuntu itself to virtualisation and private cloud, Kubernetes, and the implementation of sophisticated open source solutions such as MLops platforms, data platforms and more. We are rapidly expanding the range of open source solutions we offer and deliver to customers, as we move into new industries like telco, finance, health care and media we design and develop new open source solutions to meet their needs.

We believe that Engineering Managers should be outstanding engineers themselves. They should feel completely at home troubleshooting technical issues and having technical presales conversations with customers. They should contribute to project delivery themselves, but know that the technical contributions they bring are far less significant than their ability to shape the whole team’s direction, focus and delivery. We grow management skills and train engineers, who are interested in soft skills, to be managers.

We believe that open source is just starting to transform the tech sector and enterprise compute. Our goal is to make open source easier, more reliable and more secure for deployment and development. We strive to be the provider of ‘most software to most companies’. To deliver on that ambition, our engineers are carefully selected from the applicants across the globe. We select for brilliance and motivation to take open source to the next level. Our engineering managers help teams achieve more than they realised they could, and feel proud of the result.

The role of a Solution Architecture Manager at Canonical

The Field Engineering team is our team of cloud solutions architects at Canonical, working directly with our customers, designing private and public cloud solutions fitting their workload needs. The portfolio of products includes on-premise cloud solutions such as Openstack, MicroCloud and Ceph, and solutions that could be deployed either on-premises or in public clouds such as Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Spark, PostgreSQL, etc. The team works hands-on with the technologies by deploying, testing and handing over the solution to our support or managed services team at the end of a project. Managers and team members also take part in presales conversations to provide technical advice during the sales process.

A Solution Architecture Manager is responsible for line management and career guidance. The ability to develop engineering talent, to represent your team from a technical perspective, and to drive collaboration with other teams and customers are all critical to success in this role. You are also expected to actively participate in technical presales to help our department achieve our quarterly goals.

Location: This role will be home based, managing a team in your time zone.

What your day will look like

Lead and develop a team of Field engineers, ranging from graduate to senior, in the areas of Presales and Professional Services

Solve customer problems by promoting our technologies and being a trusted advisor

Work remotely in a single major time zone

Coach, mentor, and offer career development feedback

Identify and measure team health indicators

Implement disciplined engineering processes

Represent your team and product to stakeholders, partners, and customers

Develop and evangelise great engineering and organisational practices

Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects

Be an active part of the leadership team, collaborating with other leaders

What we are looking for in you

Knowledge of cloud computing concepts & technologies, such as Kubernetes, Openstack, AWS, GCP, Azure, Ceph, etc.

Practical knowledge of Linux and networking

Experience in technical presales

You are a dynamic person who loves to jump in new projects and interact with people

Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English