Remote Engineering Manager at Canonical

Remote Engineering Manager at Canonical - Worldwide — Remote

This is one of the most nomad-friendly engineering management roles available. Canonical has operated as a fully distributed company since 2004, with 1,200+ employees across 75+ countries and almost no office-based roles — it's remote-first by design, not as a pandemic adaptation.

Timezone flexibility: Teams are organized by major timezone bands (EMEA, Americas, APAC), so you can choose a region that suits your travel patterns. If you're nomading through Southeast Asia, you'd likely slot into APAC;
Europe-hopping fits EMEA. There's some flexibility across two time zones, but you'll need consistent overlap with your direct team for coaching and management work — this role isn't fully async.

Travel perks for nomads: The role requires travel twice a year for up to two weeks per sprint — and Canonical provides Priority Pass lounge access and travel upgrades for long-haul events. These in-person sprints are paid work trips to interesting global locations, a genuine perk for travel lovers.

• Lisbon, Portugal: ~$2,500–3,500/month comfortable living. With a D8 Digital Nomad Visa, this role's global salary is a great fit for EU residency.
• Bangkok, Thailand: ~$1,500–2,500/month. Thailand's LTR (Long-Term Resident) visa or tourist visa rotations work well; no official nomad visa yet.
• Medellín, Colombia: ~$1,500–2,200/month. Colombia offers a digital nomad visa (up to 2 years), making it a strong base for Americas-timezone teams.

The $2,000/year L&D budget can also fund remote work tools, courses, or conference travel.

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.

This is a general track for first-level engineering management positions at Canonical.

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 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.

We believe that Engineering Managers should be outstanding developers themselves. They should be completely at home reviewing a patch or a software design spec. They are trusted engineers who understand the importance of a whole-team effort in creating great products and who enjoy seeing colleagues develop. They should contribute code themselves to set the standard for coding, but know that the code they write is 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.

A typical first-level software engineering team is based in a single time zone, such as EMEA, Americas, or APAC, with an Engineering Manager and a Senior Engineer dedicated to a single product. They work as a team to shape the roadmap, technical strategy, code, documentation, and community engagement. Both are capable of coding and are comfortable assigning work and maintaining expectations of delivery.

Both will be expected to take management training at Canonical so they speak the same language when it comes to team behaviours, habits, routines, norms, and standards.

An Engineering Manager is responsible for line…