Software Engineering Manager; Backend SaaS

Software Engineering Manager (Backend SaaS)

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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 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 the reboot of our Landscape systems management solution for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is growing rapidly in the enterprise, with estates expanding from cloud to bare metal servers, to vSphere clusters, and of course desktops and devices. Ubuntu is easy to deploy and configure, one node at a time, but it is difficult to know where you stand on policy and compliance, patch management, or access control across a large estate. Ubuntu used to be under the radar in the enterprise, but it is now becoming an official platform for many companies.

Those enterprises very much want a high‑quality way to manage their Ubuntu estate.

We started work on Landscape many years ago, and the current generation of the service reflects the choices of the day. We now have the opportunity to invest significantly in a team to bring a fresh new vision for large‑scale Ubuntu estate management to the project. That doesn't make this a greenfield opportunity – we have a system that serves thousands of deployments – but we want to step back, give it a big new push, let go of some things that are no longer so important, and embrace a range of new priorities.

This role is the critical engineering leadership role for that mission.

Today we use Python, Postgre

SQL, Rabbit

MQ, HAProxy, and have a React

JS front end. In other web services projects we use more Golang these days. Our next wave of Landscape engineering is an opportunity to raise the bar on SaaS and on‑prem solution technologies, architectures, patterns and operations. Our goal is to make it easy for enterprises to own a few Landscape instances that serve their global estate, and to be able to apply policy and know intuitively where they stand – globally – in a very complex world of mixed Ubuntu versions, substrates and flavours.

Engineering managers at Canonical bring both technical and management skills to the leadership of their teams. You will work closely with product managers, and produce an engineering roadmap with ambitious and achievable goals. A successful applicant will be capable of growing a team of engineers, collaborating with other engineering and business teams at Canonical, and providing periodic updates about successes and areas of improvement.

As an engineering manager at Canonical you must be technically strong, but your responsibility is to run an effective team and develop the colleagues you manage. You are expected to help them grow as engineers, do important work, do it outstandingly well, find professional and personal satisfaction, and work well with colleagues and community. Technical leadership experience and a background in software engineering are necessary prerequisites for this role.

You will be expected to lead, challenge, and develop strong engineers, positively 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 uses. 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…