MAAS Systems Engineer - Python Toronto area

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 1100+ 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.

Location: This is an office based role. We expect the suitable candidate to be based in Toronto as you will be required to work on-site at our lab.

We are hiring a MAAS Systems Engineer to focus on building tooling to increase data center operational efficiency. As a MAAS Systems Engineer in Canonical, you will be responsible for the day-to-day management and operations of our lab in the Toronto area, which we use for Ubuntu server certification of US based silicon and server designs. You'll write and use software that deploys and configures servers and network switches, and solve difficult design problems related to doing this well and fast at scale. You will work with a mixture of hardware: cutting edge new silicon that Kernel Team and Partner Engineering teams work on to make them run Linux extremely well, as well as established hardware to make sure new versions of Ubuntu are smooth and fast. This role is a combination of software engineering focusing on reliable automated hardware commissioning and deployment, as well as testing, troubleshooting and experimentation focusing on improving reliability and performance of our software. You don't need to be an expert in all of these areas, but you need to be a good software engineer who is curious about complex distributed systems to succeed in this role. If you love hacking in your home lab, have good Python skills, and are curious about data centre hardware, you will love this opportunity.

This role entails

• Use your Python development skills to develop the Metal as a Service (MAAS) software to work with a large variety of server and network hardware.
• Actively expand MAAS functionality by creating integrations with testing and scheduling software such as Testflinger.
• Contribute improvements and fixes to Testflinger.
• Remotely operate a fully automated server lab with the latest server and network silicon from leading vendors, making sure it remains available to other teams.
• Improve and extend hardware and network monitoring through automation.
• Collaborate with other MAAS engineers, as well as data centre hardware specialists, teams responsible for certifying hardware for Ubuntu, kernel engineers and other team