Software Engineer, Sustaining Engineering Full Time NEW

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.

Job Overview

Software Engineer, Sustaining Engineering for a fast‑paced engineering role in Linux‑based software‑defined infrastructure and applications. The role covers all layers of the stack, including bare metal, virtualization (KVM), containerization (Docker/LXC/LXD), storage (Ceph and Linux filesystems), networking (OVS, OVN and Core networking), up to OpenStack and Kubernetes, and the open source applications running on top of them.

Location

This is a remote role; we have teams in all time zones.

Responsibilities

• Resolving complex customer problems related to Ubuntu, Kernel, Ceph, OpenStack, or Kubernetes and other open source software
• Maintaining a close working relationship with Canonical’s Field, Support and product engineering teams
• Participating in upstream communities
• Developing bug fixes, backporting patches, and working with upstream for inclusion
• Reviewing code produced by other engineers
• Demonstrating good judgement in technical methods and techniques
• Prioritizing work and managing your time effectively against those priorities
• Participating in team discussions to improve processes, tools, and documentation
• Maintaining clear, technical and concise communications
• Working from home and traveling internationally up to 10% of work time for team meetings, events and conferences
• Helping with troubleshooting and driving issues to resolution with workarounds, guidance, and bug fixes to be released upstream and in Ubuntu

Qualifications

• Professional experience as a software engineer
• Background in Computer Science, STEM or similar
• Strong experience with Linux, and at least one of the following:
  • Ceph, OpenStack, Kubernetes or other cloud technologies
• Strong development‑level experience with at least one of Python, Go, C or C++ on Linux
• Ability to troubleshoot with debugging tools like gdb
• Familiarity with git source code repositories and branches
• An exceptional academic track record
• Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events

Nice‑to‑have skills

• You love technology and working with brilliant people
• You are curious, flexible, articulate, and accountable
• You value soft skills and are passionate, enterprising, thoughtful, and self‑motivated
• You have interest in, and experience with most of the following: Ubuntu Linux – kernel or userspace, Kubernetes, OpenStack, Ceph, QEMU/KVM, LXC/LXD, Python, Go, C, Postgresql, Mongo, Debian packaging, distributed systems

Benefits

• Distributed work environment with twice‑yearly team sprints in person – we’ve been working remotely since 2004
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
• Annual compensation review
• Recognition rewards
• Annual holiday leave
• Maternity and paternity leave
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues from your team and others
• Priority Pass for travel and travel upgrades for long‑haul company events

About Canonical

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open‑source projects and the platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set