Engineering Manager at Canonical - Remote EMEA & Americas

Canonical is one of the most nomad-friendly employers in tech
, having operated fully remote since 2004. This Engineering Manager role explicitly covers EMEA and all American time zones, giving you enormous geographic flexibility — you could be based in Lisbon, Medellín, Tbilisi, or Cape Town without any issue.

Schedule flexibility: While the role involves managing global teams, Canonical's long-standing async-first culture means you won't be chained to a single timezone's core hours. However, as an Engineering Manager, expect some overlap with your team's working hours for 1:1s and team syncs.

Visa considerations: With no country restriction beyond EMEA and the Americas, popular nomad visa destinations are wide open:

• Portugal (D8 Digital Nomad Visa) — fits EMEA eligibility;
  Lisbon living costs ~$1,800–2,500/month

Travel perks are a standout: Canonical offers twice-yearly global sprints (1–2 weeks each), and crucially provides a Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long-haul company events — a real perk for frequent travelers. The $2,000/year learning budget can also fund certifications useful for nomad life (cloud, Kubernetes). No coworking stipend is mentioned explicitly, but the remote setup is mature and well-supported.

Canonical is building a comprehensive suite of multi-cloud and on-premise data solutions for the enterprise. We want to make it easy to operate any database on any cloud, or on premise. The data platform team covers the full range of data stores and data technologies, spanning from big data, No

SQL, cache-layer capabilities, and analytics — all the way to structured SQL engines like Postgres and MySQL. We aim to deliver fault-tolerant mission-critical distributed systems, and the world's best data platform.

We are looking for technical Engineering Managers to lead teams focused on Big Data and MySQL databases. We write code in Python and encode modern operational practices for data applications at scale on Kubernetes and cloud machines.

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Location: This role can be filled in European, Middle East, African or any American region / time zone.

• You will lead a team building scalable data solutions for Kubernetes and cloud machines
• You will hire, coach, mentor, provide feedback, and lead your team by example
• You will demonstrate sound engineering skill by directly contributing code when needed
• Effectively set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, senior management, and external stakeholders
• Develop and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices
• Ensure that your team delivers excellent products that users love by maintaining a culture of quality and engineering excellence
• Grow a healthy, collaborative engineering culture aligned with the company's values
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organization
• Work from home with global travel twice yearly, for internal events of one or two weeks duration

• A software engineering background, preferably with Python and Golang experience
• Experience running in production and at scale, preferably Big Data or MySQL
• Excellent judgement about people — their motivations, abilities, developmental needs, and prospects for success
• Proven ability to build high-quality, open-source software
• Proven ability to drive good engineering practices around performance and quality
• An open-minded attitude to new technologies and the drive to push the boundaries of what is possible
• The ambition to build products that improve how people operate software and infrastructure everywhere
• Love developing and growing people and have a track record of doing it
• Know…