Software Engineering Manager (Backend SaaS) in London

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 desktops and devices. Ubuntu is easy to deploy and configure, but it's difficult to know where you stand on policy and compliance, patch management, or access control across a large estate.

This role is the critical engineering leadership role for that mission. Today we use Python, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, HAProxy, and have a ReactJS 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.

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.

Key responsibilities:

• 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
• 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 organisation
• 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

Valued skills and experience:

• 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 similar degree
• Software development experience in Python or Golang
• Effective written and verbal communication skills
• Practical experience with Linux system administration

What we offer colleagues:

• Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
• Annual compensation review
• Recognition rewards
• Annual holiday leave
• Maternity and paternity leave
• Team Member Assistance Program & Wellness Platform
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
• Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long-haul company events

About Canonical:

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open-source projects and the platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence; in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do.