Engineering Manager
Lead cross‑functional engineering teams building cloud‑native services on Ubuntu, driving scalable Python and Golang solutions for public cloud customers while fostering a distributed, collaborative culture.
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 are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of our teams that work closely with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other world-class cloud partners to optimize Ubuntu for their infrastructure. Our team builds, tests, and publishes the base Ubuntu images used by millions to ensure optimal performance and security in their cloud estate. We aim to deliver the very best public cloud VM experience, as well as specialized images for specific purposes on each cloud. Our goal is to celebrate and enable their particular points of differentiation on their clouds, while also ensure a common operating experience for their users.
As an engineering manager you need to bring both technical and management skills to the leadership of your team. You will also need to represent the team in direct partner engagement. You’ll be responsible for the stability and functionality that our cloud users have come to expect. You will strive to automate the delivery of existing and new Ubuntu image products applied to all modern workloads from web servers to GPU-aided AI for servers, VM’s and containers.
As an engineering manager at Canonical your primary responsibility is to the people you support: ensuring that they are growing as engineers, doing valuable work, and generally having a great time at Canonical . As a lead for strong engineers, technical leadership and a solid background in software development is a must, so that you’re able to challenge and grow your team members. You will have the opportunity to influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution.
We work in Python and Golang, and expect engineering managers to be fluent in the language, architecture and components that their team is building with. Code reviews and architectural leadership are part of the job. As manager, the commitment to healthy engineering practices, documentation, quality and performance optimisation are equally important technical responsibilities, as is the requirement for fair and clear management, and the obligation to ensure a high performing team.
The role entails
Posted June 21, 2026