Observability Engineering Manager

Home Based - Americas;
Home based - EMEA

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is widely used in enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. Our customers include leading public cloud and silicon providers, and industry leaders across 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 to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder-led, profitable, and growing.

We are hiring an Observability Engineering Manager who will lead the development of the distributed tracing or service mesh products as part of our Observability group.

Engineering managers at Canonical are developers who review and lead both architecture and code. They assess people well, set expectations, and hold colleagues accountable.

We are building an observability stack that is easy to deploy and operate on Kubernetes. This is part of a broader initiative to deliver the world’s best suite of open source tools, providing deep integration and automation for best-of-breed open source offerings that cover metrics, logging, telemetry, alerting, tracing and profiling. Our goal is to make observability tools integral and pervasive across software practices.

Our implementation of Kubernetes operators is opinionated, resilient, and scalable, providing deep insights out of the box. The user experience is polished and seamless for end-users, and administrators will enjoy smooth Day 1 and Day 2 operations. We are excited to improve the state of the art for open-source observability.

This is an exciting opportunity for a software engineer passionate about open source software, Linux, Kubernetes, and Observability. Build a rewarding career with Canonical, the growing international software company behind Ubuntu.

As an Engineering Manager at Canonical, you must be technically strong, but your main responsibility is to run an effective team and develop the colleagues you manage. You will develop and review code as a leader, but the best product improvement comes from keeping the team focused, productive, and unblocked. You are expected to help them grow as engineers, do meaningful work, excel, find professional and personal satisfaction, and collaborate well with colleagues and the community.

You will influence culture, facilitate technical delivery, and regularly reflect with your team on strategy and execution. You will collaborate closely with other Engineering Managers, product managers, and architects to produce an engineering roadmap with ambitious yet achievable goals.

We expect Engineering Managers to be fluent in the programming language, architecture, and components that their team uses. Code reviews and architectural leadership are part of the role. A commitment to healthy engineering practices, documentation, quality, and performance optimization is important, as is fair and clear management and maintaining a high-performing team.

Location: This role can be home based in the EMEA or Americas regions.

• Manage a distributed team of engineers and its observability portfolio
• Organize and lead the team’s processes to help it achieve its objectives
• Conduct one-on-one meetings with team members
• Identify and measure team health indicators
• Interact with a vibrant community
• Review code produced by other engineers
• Attend conferences to represent Canonical and its Observability Stack

• An exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
• A proven track record of professional software delivery
• Professional software development experience, preferably with a track record in open source
• Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events
• Professional written and spoken English
• Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
• Passion, thoughtfulness, and self-motivation
• Excellent communication and presentation…