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. While Ubuntu is easy to deploy and configure node‑by‑node, it is difficult to know where you stand on policy and compliance, patch management, or access control across a large estate.

The new Landscape platform will provide a high‑quality way for enterprises to manage their Ubuntu estate, giving them visibility across mixed Ubuntu versions, substrates, and flavours.

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 is not a greenfield opportunity – we have a system that serves thousands of deployments – but we want to step back, simplify, and embrace new priorities.

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

Today we use Python, Postgre

SQL, Rabbit

MQ, HAProxy, and a React

JS front end. In other web‑services projects we use more Golang. 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 apply policy and understand their status globally.

Engineering managers at Canonical bring both technical and management skills to the leadership of their teams. You will work closely with product managers, produce an engineering roadmap with ambitious and achievable goals, grow a team of engineers, collaborate with other engineering and business teams, and provide periodic updates about successes and areas of improvement.

• Build and lead a team of engineers in your region
• Develop talent through coaching, mentoring, feedback, and hands‑on career development
• Demonstrate sound engineering principles and directly contribute toward your team's goals
• Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, management, and external stakeholders
• Lead modern, agile software development practices
• Ensure a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the company values
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organization
• Build automated, highly reliable image delivery, testing, and publication pipelines
• Engage with many other teams at Canonical, as well as the open‑source community and commercial partners
• Work from home with global travel 4‑6 weeks per year for internal and external events

• You love to mentor, develop and grow people, and have a track record of doing it
• You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development
• You are focused on success and the delivery of timely, high‑quality software
• You have experience and commitment to agile development methodologies
• You have a Bachelor's or equivalent in Computer Science, STEM, or a similar degree
• Software development experience in Python or Golang
• Effective written and verbal communication skills
• Practical experience with Linux system administration

• Distributed…